May 13. By Dave Vieser. In a town with more than a dozen banks and financial institutions, one more is planning to join the crowd.

HomeTrust Bank, based in Asheville, will build a two-story, 7,000-square-foot branch near the intersection of West Catawba Avenue and Old Jetton Road.

In a strange twist, the $3.5 billion (assets) bank won’t need the approval of either the present day Planning Board or Town Board because the location received the official go-ahead from the town 13 years ago. The property is between the Lakeside Professional Building and Dutchman’s Furniture.

The only review on a municipal level is being performed by the town’s Architectural Review Board.

Town Manager Andrew Grant said once the project was started more than a decade ago, there was no expiration for individual buildings, rather “it was vested in perpetuity.”

The development which includes Home Trust built all but one building between 2006 and 2008, with the final building now in 2019, Grant said.

The Old Jetton Road site is a couple of blocks from the intersection with Jetton Road, a high-accident location. Due to the zoning codes in place at the time of the approval in 2006 town officials will not have the ability to require any traffic studies, even if they wanted to.

“State vesting laws are pretty straight forward” said Town Planning Director Wayne Herron. “Local governments do not have the opportunity to require updates or redos on development approvals unless there are major amendments in the original approval.”

He said the new bank will have minimal trip generation and minimal impact. “Banks today just do not have the peak hourly and daily trips that banks used to have due to people doing so much daily banking online,” Herron said.

Founded in 1926, HomeTrust has 43 branches in the Carolinas, Tennessee and southwest Virginia. With $3.5 billion in assets as of March 31, they are the second largest community bank headquartered in North Carolina.