Meridian Trust's board votes, again, to stay independent — five years after saying no to a buyer
The Portland community bank holds an independence vote every autumn. This year nobody was offering. The vote was 9–0 anyway.
PORTLAND — The nine directors of Meridian Trust Bank gathered Tuesday for a vote they have now held five years in a row: whether the 64-year-old community bank should remain independent. For the fifth time, the result was unanimous. For the fourth time, no one had offered to buy it.
The ritual dates to 2021, when a national bank approached Meridian with an offer that would have tripled its size. The board, led by retired Oregon Court of Appeals judge Eleanor Hastings, spent three months deliberating — including open meetings with staff at all three of the bank's branches — and declined.
'Independence isn't a slogan,' Hastings, 72, said in an interview after Tuesday's meeting. 'It's a decision the board makes again every time someone offers to buy it. We've decided to make it even when they don't.'
The bank, which was chartered in Salem in 1962 by eleven Willamette Valley farmers and shopkeepers, holds about $1.4 billion in assets and operates branches in Portland, Bend and Salem. Community banks of its size have been disappearing: the number of FDIC-insured institutions in Oregon has fallen by more than half since 2000, mostly through acquisition.
Chief executive Daniel Reyes, who began at the bank as a part-time teller in 1991, said the annual vote has practical effects. 'When a bank is for sale, every decision gets made with the buyer in mind,' he said. 'When the board tells you every October that it isn't, you make seven-year loans to hazelnut orchards. You build a checking account for people other banks turned away. You can afford to be slow.'
Board member Robert Tanaka, a third-generation Woodburn hazelnut farmer, said agricultural lending — now a fifth of the bank's loan book — would likely not survive an acquisition. 'An orchard takes seven years to pay. A bank that's going to be sold in three doesn't make that loan,' he said.
Hastings acknowledged the decision has a cost. The board's minutes from 2021, which she described in a recent essay, included the chief financial officer's estimate of what shareholders gave up by declining. 'We wrote the number down,' she said. 'A decision you can't put a price on isn't a decision. It's a mood.'
“Independence isn't a slogan. It's a decision the board makes again every time someone offers to buy it. We've decided to make it even when they don't.”— Hon. Eleanor Hastings (Ret.)