Minnesota bank steps out of the cold

Community bankers in Sarasota are abuzz over the latest competitor to the join the trenches, this one via a government-forced ousting of two other institutions.

The new player is St. Cloud, Minn.-based Stearns Bank, a seven-branch institution founded in 1912 that was sitting at $873 million in assets as of March 31, before it went on a buying spree. Stearns officially entered Florida Aug. 7, when it took on the $550 million in combined assets of Sarasota-based First State Bank and Venice-based Community National Bank of Sarasota County through a purchase agreement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The story of those two banks, under regulatory watch for several months, is becoming standard fare, both on the Gulf Coast and nationwide: Not enough capital to cover non-performing loans and assets. First State, with $451 million in assets and branches in Sarasota and St. Petersburg, was the largest of the pair, which marked the 70th and 71st FDIC-monitored bank shutdown in 2009.