Supercharged Eldorado Team Gets a Boost : Management: In an unexpected move, former CommerceBank chief Raymond E. Dellerba is named to head daily operations of the Tustin-based bank.

Eldorado Bank, which formed a supercharged management team only 16 months ago to launch a period of fast growth, said Friday that it has hired Raymond E. Dellerba to head the bank’s daily operations.

Dellerba, 44, who resigned recently as president of troubled CommerceBank in Newport Beach, will take over as Eldorado president and assume the new post of chief operating officer on Feb. 16.

J.B. Crowell, who will relinquish his title as bank president, will remain as the bank’s chief executive and will become its chairman. He will also remain as president and chief executive of the bank’s Laguna Hills parent company, Eldorado Bancorp.

Crowell, 59, the company’s largest single shareholder, succeeds George Wells as the bank’s chairman. Wells, 58, will continue as chairman of the parent company.

“Raymond Dellerba has experience in overseeing a bank of comparable size and is a strong business banker,” Crowell said. “We are looking to further growth internally with this additional executive officer and through anticipated merger and acquisition activity.”

Dellerba, an Ohio native, began his banking career in Arizona in 1971. He then worked at Imperial Bank for five years before joining CommerceBank in 1983. He was promoted to president in 1990 and to chief executive in 1992.

Crowell said he hopes to spend more time on long-range strategic planning and merger talks as the bank strives to increase its size and profits “substantially.”

“We’re going to start growing again,” he said. “We’ve got the talent to do it.”

Dellerba’s hiring stunned some industry insiders, partly because the veteran banker was considered by regulators to be too inexperienced to work out CommerceBank’s problems loans. Eldorado, though, doesn’t suffer from a high level of bad loans.

Even so, Eldorado is deep with management talent and had been expected to promote from within its ranks. Among the senior managers are four executives who have been presidents at other banks.

In particular, the hiring closes the door on Harvey Ferguson, the bank’s chief administrative officer. He was believed to have a slight edge when Crowell hired him in 1991 as part of a high-energy top management team that would help the bank grow to $700 million in assets by the end of 1995.

The bank, however, has lost ground during the recession, dropping from $355.2 million in assets after it acquired Bank of San Clemente in late 1991 to $346.5 million at the end of September.

The bank, nevertheless, has prospered under Crowell, who has espoused income growth over asset growth and maintained the financial soundness of the bank during the tumultuous 1980s. The bank’s profit of $2.7 million for the first nine months last year nearly equals its $2.75 million net income for all of 1991.