City Keeping Its Cool

It may have been the year of the corporate proxy fight at annual shareholders’ meetings in other parts of the country, but in San Diego, corporate annual meetings were relatively dreary, routine gatherings.

Even those companies whose shareholders were full of righteous indignation over losses, improper insider dealings, lucrative golden parachutes and costly management snafus, rarely articulated their concerns with anything more than rhetoric.

San Diego shareholders who were supposed to be wrathful were instead weary, and executives who expected hard-hitting exchanges instead fielded softball-style questions.

Not that there weren’t some caustic events at some of the smaller banks’ annual meetings; but even those were handled fairly easily by management.

“We expected a tougher meeting,” said an executive of Sun Savings & Loan after the company’s annual shareholders gathering.

It was, by nearly all accounts, a tame affair.

Ditto at Oak Industries’ annual meeting, where officials had predicted an overflow crowd and hostile queries. They got neither.

To sum up, one corporate executive said, “People out here are less outspoken than on the East Coast.”