LaCrosse Community Pride welcomes new bank

President, LaCrosse Community Pride

Sterling Bank has announced that it will open a branch in LaCrosse to serve rural and business customers in our area. LaCrosse Community Pride is extremely happy to confirm and announce that LaCrosse will soon have a bank again in our community.

Our thanks go out to Sterling Bank for making a commitment to our community by establishing a branch bank in LaCrosse. Our organization is also proud of the support that our local businesses provided including The McGregor Company, Startin’s Repair, Jasper Trucking and many other local and regional business and civic leaders for their hard work helping bring financial services back to LaCrosse. Our community residents indicated an overwhelming willingness to support a new bank in LaCrosse with over 300 signatures collected indicating their intent on switching to and supporting a local bank.

It has been a long and tedious process to bring the bank building into local ownership and to attract a serious and dependable bank operation back to our town since the doors closed on our local Bank of Whitman branch. The LaCrosse Community Pride board eagerly took the lead in making this happen. The 11 LCP board members had a vision that the community needed and would support a bank and over the past several months the board worked tirelessly to help make it happen.

Brokered with the assistance of The McGregor Company, LaCrosse Community Pride will own the building as a distinctly separate project from its historic store project that is currently underway. LCP will have a lease with Sterling Bank who will manage and operate the branch. Payments from a long-term lease with Sterling Bank will service the debt on the building as well as pay for maintenance and upkeep. Board members are unanimous in their belief that a bank is essential to the vitality of a community.

LaCrosse Community Pride is a non-profit organization established in 2010. The LaCrosse Community Pride board will continue working to restore the historic store site in LaCrosse in order to establish a grocery store and provide an upgraded Whitman County Library branch and other business opportunities within the old store structure.

LCP will maintain separate accounting and management structures between the store project and the bank project to assure that donations and grants made on behalf of the grocery store are managed completely separate from the new bank project. Both projects are essential for our LaCrosse community and residents and LCP has the wherewithal and determination to make the store and bank a success for the town.

According to its mission and purpose, LaCrosse Community Pride is dedicated to preserving our community and a rural lifestyle for its residents. According to one of our area’s enthusiastic historians, there are “two traits that pioneers brought with them to Western Whitman County: dyed-in-the wool optimism and a tenacity that verged on stubbornness. Traits that were useful then, useful now, and will be useful in the future for the success of our community and area.”

LaCrosse Community Pride is optimistic and stubborn in our efforts to revitalize our community and surrounding area and we work to provide a good lifestyle for our residents, today and tomorrow and beyond.