Great Bend bank holding company to relocate to Wichita

American State Bancshares, a Great Bend-based bank holding company with $675 million in assets, is moving its headquarters to Wichita, its chief executive said Wednesday.

The holding company of three Kansas banks, including Rose Hill Bank, will be moving into more than 2,700 square feet of office space at Occidental Management’s Northrock Offices, 8111 E. 32nd St. North.

“We hope to be in 60 days from today,” said Don LacKamp, American State Bancshares president and CEO.

“I had always intended to move here after we acquired the Rose Hill charter (in 2011),” he said.

But LacKamp said he wasn’t ready to move the corporate headquarters until it found a new chief executive for its namesake bank, American State Bank & Trust Co., also in Great Bend. “Last summer we finally found the candidate we were looking for,” he said.

LacKamp said he had moved his primary residence to Wichita a couple of years ago and has been traveling back and forth to Great Bend. “It just made sense to … stop commuting on weekends,” he said. “It was time to kind of bring normalcy back to our lives.”

Six other staff members will be joining LacKamp in Wichita, he said, including the company’s human resources officer, a corporate secretary and in-house counsel, a newly hired senior vice president and director of corporate strategies, a part-time risk officer and two support staff members.

He said he has provisions in the lease to expand into adjoining space “as our staff needs increase.”

Chad Stafford of Occidental handled the lease.

“It’s the last shell space we have” in Northrock Offices, Stafford said.

Spangenberg Phillips Tice is the architect for American State’s new office space. Sauerwein Construction is the general contractor.

LacKamp noted that American State’s Rose Hill Bank is one of the banks that is providing financing to Occidental’s Offices at Cranbrook project in northeast Wichita, as well as its proposed $54 million Union Station project downtown.

“We have developed a very good working relationship with Occidental Management, and we’re really looking forward to increasing our presence in Wichita,” LacKamp said.

American State Bancshares was established in 2001. Besides Rose Hill and its namesake Great Bend bank, it also owns Peoples Exchange Bank in Belleville, which is in north-central Kansas.

This story was originally published August 20, 2014 at 10:23 AM with the headline "Great Bend bank holding company to relocate to Wichita."