Bank Pulls Out of 2-Year Slide : Economy: A. Levy officials optimistic after reporting $1.36-million quarterly gain.

The Ventura-based Bank of A. Levy on Tuesday reported a profit of $1.36 million for the first quarter of 1994, the first gain the bank has made in seven consecutive quarters.

“It’s our first profit in two years,” said Marshall C. Milligan, the bank’s president and chief executive officer.

“It (the recession’s aftermath) is not over yet, but we’re confident that we’re making good progress,” he said.

In the first quarter of 1993, the bank reported a net loss of $800,000. As recently as the last quarter of 1993, the Bank of A. Levy had a net loss of $981,000.

Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecasting Project, said the news was one of many signs throughout Ventura County that the economy is improving, although slightly.

“It looks like the business climate is at least beginning to solidify its losses,” Schniepp said. He said that across California, banks were showing signs of recovery in 1993.

“In 1994, it should be even better,” he said.

Milligan said the bank’s strongest area of earnings was in the recovery of $695,000 worth of real estate and commercial-business loans that had gone unpaid.

The bank also made a pretax gain of $360,000 on the sale of its former Vineyard Avenue office in Oxnard. In addition, the sale of foreclosed real estate deals contributed to profits, Milligan said.

During the quarter, the bank wrote off $674,000 in bad loans.

The future looks optimistic for the bank, he said.

“We don’t have additional problem loans,” he said. “We’re in the later stages of cleaning up problems that developed in 1991 and 1992, and we’re making progress through that cycle.”

While the Jan. 17 earthquake adversely affected banks in the San Fernando Valley, it had little effect on the Bank of A. Levy, Milligan said.

The day after the quake, 16 of the 17 county branches were open. Although the bank established an emergency loan program for earthquake victims, those loans had a negligible impact on the bank’s earnings, he said.

Milligan predicted it would be another 12 to 18 months before the bank could completely resolve the damage done to its portfolio by the recession.

The Bank of A. Levy is the county’s largest locally owned bank. Its closest competitor, Ventura County National Bank, recently reported losses of $114,000 for the first quarter 1994. But compared with VCNB’s losses in the first quarter of 1993 of $1.58 million, officials there were optimistic about the smaller losses.