Oneida Savings Bank delays planned job cuts by three months

ONEIDA, N.Y. — Oneida Savings Bank, a unit of Oneida Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: ONFC), has pushed back 61 job cuts to back-office positions planned for its offices in Rome and Oneida until the fall.

The banking company now expects to implement the job reductions between Oct. 14 and Oct. 27, after originally targeting July 17 to July 30. The change was disclosed in a notification on the New York Department of Labor website in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which requires businesses of a certain size to give notice of layoffs and closings before they happen.

The job cuts are the result of Oneida Financial’s impending acquisition by DeWitt–based Community Bank System Inc. (NYSE: CBU). Community Bank recently announced it will extend the anticipated timeframe for closing the transaction “beyond early July,” the original target, to sometime in the third or fourth quarter.

The cuts will be made to positions with “overlapping operational responsibilities,” Hal Wentworth, senior vice president of retail banking for Community Bank, said in a statement in mid-May when the layoffs were first announced.

It was late February when Community Bank System first announced plans to acquire Oneida Financial for about $142 million in a mix of stock and cash.

Community Bank System, with assets of about $7.6 billion, operates more than 190 branches across upstate New York and Northeastern Pennsylvania through its banking subsidiary, Community Bank, N.A. That includes 51 branches in the 16-county Central New York area, including seven in the Syracuse metro area, according to FDIC data.

Oneida Financial, headquartered in Oneida, had total assets of nearly $882 million as of March 31, deposits of $771.5 million, and 12 banking offices across Madison and Oneida counties.

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