Logan bank reduces hours before its closure

About a month before Logan’s only bank is scheduled to close, it reduced its hours of service to only two days a week.

Starting this week, New Mexico Bank & Trust will open its Logan branch along U.S. 54 only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.

Those hours will apply both to lobby and drive-through services.

Shauna Shannon, vice president of marketing for New Mexico Bank & Trust, cited the lack of staff to open the Logan branch on more days before it closes for good on Dec. 16.

“Currently, we only have one employee officially assigned to the Logan branch,” Shannon stated in an email to the Quay County Sun. “A colleague from our Tucumcari banking center will assist this employee on the days we are open. The other employees who used to work at this location have moved on from the company.”

Shannon said on the Logan branch’s final day on Dec. 16, it would be open until noon “to help customers complete any remaining business.”

The Logan branch’s cutback in hours was discussed during the Nov. 14 board meeting of Logan Municipal Schools.

Superintendent Dennis Roch said he would have directed the board in December to approve a letter to the New Mexico Public Education Department to change the district’s money-deposits schedule from daily to weekly after the Logan branch closes.

However, after the unexpected reduction in the branch’s hours of operation, Roch said the board may have to consider a special meeting to change that deposit schedule. The news of the branch’s reduction in hours happened too late to place it on the board’s Nov. 14 agenda.

The Quay County villages of House and San Jon each lack banks. Bonnie Lightfoot, superintendent at House Municipal Schools, said her school district has been given authority to make deposits weekly. Alan Umholtz, superintendent of San Jon Municipal Schools, said if the school district receives funds to deposit, a district employee travels to a bank in Tucumcari to deposit them.

New Mexico Bank & Trust initially announced in March it would close its Logan branch in early June but rescheduled it to Dec. 14 after several local government entities passed resolutions that requested the closing be delayed so a new bank could be found.

New Mexico Bank and Trust President and CEO Greg Leyendecker stated at the time it extended the closing period “to give community leaders time to find another financial institution to service Logan and surrounding areas and also enable us to determine better ways to serve the market area from our Tucumcari Banking Center.”

Logan attorney Warren Frost, who has been a point man in the effort to find a new bank in the village, stated in an email Friday that he and others have been unsuccessful in their efforts. He previously cited the lack of loans in the village for other banking institutions’ lack of interest.

Once the New Mexico Bank & Trust closes in Logan, it would be the first time in more than a century the village has lacked a bank.

The departure from Logan would be less than two years after New Mexico Bank & Trust acquired it and other banks in the region during its acquisition of FNB New Mexico in February 2021.

New Mexico Bank & Trust is a subsidiary of HTLF, formerly known as Heartland Financial USA Inc., based in Iowa that operates in 12 states.

Logan’s first bank was the McFarland Brothers Bank. It opened in 1904 in a sandstone building at the corner of Second and Martinez streets, which still stands.

The bank closed in the late 1990s, and FNB opened a new building in the village on U.S. 54.