Credit card rejection seems ironic amid our current excesses

The parent of a teenager with even marginal grades needs a paper shredder to deal with all the credit card and college loan offers that arrive unsolicited.

Want an easy way to get "stuff" you can't afford because you don't have a job? Here's a MasterCard. Want to buy a new laptop and an HDTV to go with that outrageous tuition? Here's $40,000. Take it.

Good grief, the global economy has nearly been undone by the expectation that everybody in the United States must own an overpriced home, whether they could afford to buy one or not.

Everybody, it seems, wants to give you money. Unless, that is, you are a brand new municipality.

As if Campton Hills hadn't already discovered that birthing a town was plenty painful and messy, it was reminded again recently that nothing about the process is simple or easy.

When it wanted to hire a different Web site provider, it was informed that the provider of its choice required automated payment via credit card. So the village dutifully made application for a town credit card.

And got rejected.

By every credit card company it asked.

"It is crazy, isn't it?" said Campton Hills Village President Patsy Smith when I noted the irony of mail boxes full of credit card and loan applications versus her community's rejection.

"I don't know if the subprime mess has made it harder or if it was always this way," she said.

First, Smith said, Campton Hills had to show it had $2 million per year in revenue. Because it had only been in existence part of a year, it couldn't. But it could show it would meet that revenue stipulation over a full year. One down.

The other main requirement, however, was insurmountable -- but with the passage of time. It had to show a three-year credit history. Impossible at the moment, of course.

Now if Smith or one of the other civic leaders wanted to co-sign on a card personally, they were told, the village could get a credit card. But none of them is dumb enough to tie their personal family finances to the village.

And Smith said they could probably sue to challenge the internal credit card policies, a choice not very palatable to a community that has already had to spend thousands in court just to exist.

"It's really not worth it to spend money just to get a credit card," said Smith. Truer words were never spoken, not when cards generally get handed out like candy.

So what's a village to do?

It wants to rent server space from an established Web site provider. According to Don Grillo, who did the research for the village on various providers, it has to sign a contract for a certain amount of time at a certain price, and pay for it on an automatic basis. A server space rental agreement, basically.

Smith says it looks like Campton Hills will do what most everybody else does when they need something at a rational price and without a lot of trouble.

It'll go to Wal-Mart.

There, Smith said, it appears the village can buy a debit card, which it'll use like a credit card to pay the Web site provider.

And wait until enough time passes so that a village of thousands with a guaranteed cash flow of millions can receive what every pockets-to-let 18-year-old in the country can get just by opening the mail.