Jan. 4--The big-name national banks aren't the only ones lining up on the steps of the U.S. Treasury.

Many of the banks doing business in the central San Joaquin Valley -- including some headquartered here -- are among the hundreds of financial institutions across the country applying for a slice of the $250 billion federal bank bailout.

Through Tuesday, more than 200 publicly and privately owned banks had received approval in the Capital Purchase Program to swap preferred shares of their stock for Treasury Department cash. Many more await word on whether their applications have been approved.

"We hate the term 'bailout,' " said Dan Doyle, president of Fresno's Central Valley Community Bank. "That was almost enough for us to not do it. We didn't want the perception to be that we needed a bailout."

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department notified Central Valley Community that it won preliminary approval for its application to sell a $7 million stake to the federal government.

Now it's up to the bank's board to decide whether to do the deal.

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Doyle said regulators encouraged his bank to apply, "based on the thought that only good, healthy banks will be eligible for the funds -- banks that will be able to continue lending, which is the whole thrust of the program."

That point was underscored by Neel Kashkari, the Treasury Department's interim assistant secretary for financial stability, in a speech last month to the Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Washington, D.C.

Kashkari said, "If we have a dollar and we give this dollar to a healthy bank or we gave that same dollar to a failing bank or a struggling bank, that healthy bank is much more likely to turn around and extend credit with that same dollar."

The Capital Purchase Program is part of the larger $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

The nation's biggest banks with branches in the Valley -- Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank and JPMorgan Chase (which took over the failed Washington Mutual Bank) -- are each receiving $25 billion nationally from the Treasury Department.

More modest are the expectations of smaller Valley-owned banks with applications pending, such as Fresno First Bank and Premier Valley Bank in Fresno; Valley Business Bank, headquartered in Visalia; and Merced-based County Bank.

Of the four, County Bank and its parent company, Capital Corp of the West, potentially has the most at stake. The company reported a third-quarter loss of $54.6 million and is considered "adequately capitalized" -- rather than "well capitalized" -- by its regulators with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.