Banking tells the real story

With its acquisition by Choice, Great Plains customers will see a new sign on the five locations, as well as more mobile banking options.

Beyond that, “they will see the same people and the same smiling faces,” Artz said.

Senior Vice President Bruce Baer said it was Choice Financial’s small-town feel that led Great Plains to pursue the partnership with that bank in particular.

The need for newer, more advanced mobile banking options at the Belfield bank represents the younger people moving to the area, bank Vice President Chuck Bokinskie said.

“With the new influx of people moving to the area, they’re predominantly younger and much more mobile than what our previous client base was, so that kind of drives the need for technology,” he said.

“You just have to change with what the client base is,” he said.

For a while, Bokinskie and Baer said, the bank saw an influx of those younger people opening new accounts.

“For a while, it was just a steady stream of younger clientele opening up new accounts here at the bank,” Bokinskie said.

“They’re probably more demanding than our older clients are.”

A lot of them didn’t even want check blanks, Baer said.

“All they want is a debit card.”

The bankers are also seeing a lot of men coming that don’t bring their families — “they came up here just to work until the job market came back in their hometown,” Baer said.

Keeping people in town for a long time is a problem for Belfield, where manufactured homes are the most common new housing and there’s a full liquor store, but no grocery store.

Many say housing is Belfield’s most visible change.

“Mainly what we notice is additional housing,” Mayor Leo Schneider said. “Usually manufactured homes is what most of them are.”

Being in a flood plain, downtown Belfield is a hard place to add new development, leaving the land to the north of Interstate 94 as the most likely location for new businesses.

The first of what may be a trend there is developer American Landmark Group’s 42-acre proposal, which is in its final planning and design stages.

“Belfield Crossing,” just northwest of the intersection of the town’s lone exit onto Interstate 94, will likely house a hotel, four restaurants, office warehouse space and retail locations, said Mitch Beckstead, managing partner of ALG.
Baer said even just across the street from his home, he has seen Belfield’s housing boom.

“The lot across the street from my house used to have just one trailer house on it,” he said. Now, two years later, “there’s three duplexes, a five-bedroom house and two additional trailer houses.”

“It’s not my little street anymore.”