Bethpage Federal moves jobs off LI, adds jobs on LI

Bethpage Federal Credit Union said it will move 91 jobs from Long Island to Colorado and Maryland over the next 18 months to cut costs.

But it reiterated plans to open 12 new branches in Nassau and Suffolk and increase its local workforce over the next three years.

Bethpage president and chief executive Kirk Kordeleski said Thursday the 12 branches and other expanded services will add an estimated 158 jobs. He said the 91 workers whose jobs are being moved to Maryland and Colorado will be reassigned on Long Island.

The Colorado and Maryland locations, near Denver and Baltimore, respectively, are for back office, collection and telephone customer service work and are being shared with two other credit unions, Bellco Credit Union, one of the largest in Colorado, and SECU, Maryland's largest.

The center in Greenwood Village, Colo., employs 80. The new center in Linthicum, Md., is to employ a total of 270 people when it opens in the first quarter of next year.

"In this plan, Bethpage will be expanding its eight-year-old shared services plan with our two current out-of-state credit union partners," it said in a fact sheet. "Each will remain independent and focus on their local community.

Kordeleski said the Colorado and Maryland workers would be employed by a new corporate entity formed by the three credit unions. The combination of sharing functions with the other credit unions, and the transfer of jobs with the resultant lower salaries, will save Bethpage $6 million to $8 million per year, he said. Bethpage has about 500 workers on Long Island now.

Bethpage is the state's largest credit union, with 26 branches, more than 203,000 members and $4.7 billion in assets.

As of May, it had added a net of 38,600 members since the end of 2009 and, last year, reported record earnings of about $41 million. Most of its lending is in mortgages and car loans, but it has been growing its commercial lending business.

Bethpage said the move announced Thursday was unrelated to its disclosure last month that a computer error by an employee caused some of the personal information of nearly 86,000 members to be viewable on the Internet for a month. It said the leaked data included names, addresses, dates of birth, VISA card numbers and expiration dates, and members' savings and checking account numbers. It didn't include Social Security numbers, card PINs or the three-digit security codes on the back of the cards.

Bethpage said making use of the posted information would be difficult and that there had been no unauthorized use of debit cards or unauthorized withdrawals from accounts.