FDIC Federal Register Citations

American National Bank & Trust Company

October 18, 2004

Mr. Robert E. Feldman
Executive Secretary
Attention: Comments/Legal ESS
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
550 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20429


Re: RIN Number 3064-AC50: FDIC Proposed Increase in the Threshold for the Small Bank CRA Streamlined Examination

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am Chief Executive Officer of American National Bank and Trust Company, headquartered in Danville, Virginia, a small city of 47,000 residents. In addition to Danville, we serve the surrounding Pittsylvania County, as well as the contiguous counties of Halifax and Henry in Virginia and Caswell in North Carolina. Our bank is $623 million in assets and subject to the large bank CRA exam. I am writing to strongly support the FDIC's proposal to raise the threshold for the streamlined small bank CRA examination to $1 billion without regard to the size of the bank's holding company. This would greatly relieve the regulatory burden imposed on many small banks such as ours, which are required to meet the standards imposed on the nation's largest banks. I understand that this is not an exemption from CRA and that our bank would still have to help meet the credit needs of its entire community and be evaluated by our regulator. However, I believe that this would lower our current regulatory burden by hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars in software costs.

I also support the addition of a community development criterion to the small bank examination for larger community banks. It appears to be a significant improvement over the investment test. However, I urge the FDIC to adopt its original $500 million threshold for small banks without a CD criterion and only apply the new CD criterion to community banks greater than $500 million up to $1 billion. Banks under $500 million now hold about the same percent of overall industry assets as community banks under $250 million did a decade ago when the revised CRA regulations were adopted, so this adjustment in the CRA threshold is appropriate. As FDIC examiners know, it has proven extremely difficult for small banks, especially those in rural areas, to find appropriate CRA qualified investments in their communities. Many small banks have had to make regional or statewide investments that are extremely unlikely to ever benefit the banks' own communities. That was certainly not intent of Congress when it enacted CRA. As noted in our most recent CRA exam, most investments available are through statewide programs that, while covering our assessment area, are not specific to it. Additionally, the exam noted that no local programs were available that specifically benefited our North Carolina assessment area; therefore, all investments must be through statewide or regional programs.

An additional reason to support the FDIC's CD criterion is that it significantly reduces the current regulation's "cliff effect." Today, when a small bank goes over $250 million, it must completely reorganize its CRA program and begin a massive new reporting, monitoring and investment program. If the FDIC adopts its proposal, a state nonmember bank would move from the small bank examination to an expanded but still streamlined small bank examination, with the flexibility to mix Community Development loans, services and investments to meet the new CD criterion. This would be far more appropriate to the size of the bank, and far better than subjecting the community bank to the same large bank examination that applies to $1 trillion banks. This more graduated transition to the large bank examination is a significant improvement over the current regulation.

I strongly oppose making the CD criterion a separate test from the bank's overall CRA evaluation. For a community bank, CD lending is not significantly different from the provision of credit to the entire community. The current small bank test considers the institution's overall lending in its community. The addition of a category of CD lending (and services to aid lending and investments as a substitute for lending) fits well within the concept of serving the whole community. A separate test would create an additional CD obligation and regulatory burden that would erode the benefit of the streamlined exam.

I strongly support the FDIC's proposal to change the definition of "community development" from only focusing on low- and moderate-income area residents to including rural residents. I think that this change in the definition will go a long way toward eliminating the current distortions in the regulation. We caution the FDIC to provide a definition of "rural" that will not be subject to misuse to favor just affluent residents of rural areas. Simply because of the rural makeup of most of our assessment area where the persons per square mile is less than 50% of the state average, our lending practices clearly meets the CRA goal of lending to the entire community. This includes loans to local church-sponsored community programs, small businesses and the agricultural community.

In conclusion, I believe that the FDIC has proposed a major improvement in the CRA regulations, one that much more closely aligns the regulations with the Community Reinvestment Act itself, and I urge the FDIC to adopt its proposal, with the recommendations above. I will be happy to discuss these issues further with you, if that would be helpful.

Sincerely,
Charles H. Majors
President and Chief Executive Officer