Small-Town Life (Opinion)

The beautiful thing about small-town life, in Arkansas or anywhere else, is there just aren’t nearly as many people as in the cities.

But there’s a price to be paid for that intimacy.

Last month BancorpSouth, the Mississippi bank that has the fifth-largest deposit market share in Arkansas, said it would be closing 23 branches in six states. Last week it got specific: Nine of those branches will be in Arkansas, the most to be closed in any state.

As we studied the list of closures here at Arkansas Business, we noticed some of the branches were in communities so small there might not be any other banks in town. And we were right: BancorpSouth’s exercise in branch-pruning means Chidester in Ouachita County, Humphrey on the border of Jefferson and Arkansas counties and Humnoke in Lonoke County will be left bankless.

And that will be a hardship, especially for older residents, which is often a large segment of the dwindling small-town population. We share the sentiment of Humphrey Mayor Alice Black.

“My concern as mayor is the elderly people we have here without a vehicle who walk to the bank,” Black said. “Will they have to pay someone to drive them to Stuttgart to do their banking, with gas prices where they are? It’s gonna be a hardship.”

The elderly also are the least likely to be comfortable enough with computers to use online banking services.

But we can’t blame BancorpSouth. Chidester only had 287 residents as of the 2010 Census count, and the BancorpSouth branch there had fewer than $3 million in deposits as of June 30, 2010, the last time the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took a branch-level snapshot.

The branches in Humphrey and Humnoke are even smaller, just limited-service offices that don’t even claim any deposits. It clearly doesn’t make sense for the shareholders of BancorpSouth to operate offices that don’t contribute to the bottom line and aren’t likely to in the future.

Despite the documented explosion of branches in Arkansas in the decade before the Great Recession, there were always many small towns without banking facilities. Chidester, Humphrey and Humnoke are just the latest to join the ranks of the underbanked.

And branches are closing even in bigger towns and small cities where residents do have other options. (Residents of Mountainburg, the Crawford County burg where BancorpSouth is closing another branch, can switch to Citizens Bank & Trust if they don’t want to drive to Van Buren to do their banking.) According to the FDIC, there are 1,472 bank branches in Arkansas, down from 1,513 as of June 30 of 2008.

We won’t be surprised to hear of more branch closings in Arkansas cities, large and small. Like other excesses of the past decade, some branches have become unaffordable luxuries for the banks.