Motorcycles and small banks may not be an apparent match, but Troy Peters will tell you that they have a lot in common.

They both require your complete concentration to operate and help navigate the landscape, both prefer Main Street to the Interstate, and both have to be on the lookout for catastrophe on the horizon.

“We didn’t take I-78 today. We would have been surrounded by huge trucks. Those trucks don’t travel the back roads, they don’t know the side streets, the Main Streets like this,” Peters, owner of Jonestown Bank and Trust in Lebanon County, said Monday.

He and a colleague with the Pennsylvania Community Bank Association, rode their motorcycles to Jim Thorpe Monday to meet with Carbon County officials for help getting Washington’s attention.

PACB calls it their “Roll to Repeal.” Over the next year, Peters and Nick DiFrancesco, PACB president and CEO, ride across the state to try to get support for the repeal of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — legislation they say has had the unintended consequence of crippling local banks.

In Jim Thorpe on Monday, they met with Carbon County Commissioners William O’Gurek and Thomas J. Gerhard. While they come from different parties, the two men said they support community banks in their quest to get relief. O’Gurek said he recently contacted Congressman Matt Cartwright to see if he would be open to meeting and discussing the issues the banks faced.

“Within a matter of a few minutes he wrote back and said he thought that is a great idea,” he said.

Carbon County has three community banks — Jim Thorpe Neighborhood Bank, Mauch Chunk Trust, and First Northern Bank of Palmerton.

There was nothing in the original Dodd-Frank legislation aimed at hurting local banks, DiFrancesco said. But it included a large number of regulations aimed at protecting consumers from the mortgage crisis that caused the 2008 collapse.

But banks like JTNB said they have had to add three employees just to keep up with the paperwork created by the regulations. JTNB CEO Craig Zurn said that takes people and resources away from their core business of serving local businesses and residents.

“The nature of our business has changed from lending and investing in our communities, to compliance,” Zurn said.

The biggest national banks have upward of 200,000 employees, and may be better equipped to deal with the regulations.

The numbers suggest there has been an effect. Peters said before 2008, there were 100 new banks per year.

Since then it’s slowed to fewer than 10. In Schuylkill County, Miners Bank, Liberty Savings Bank and First National Bank of Minersville all closed up within a year.

“When I can’t make mortgage loans because of the ways the loans are written now, those are things that just don’t pass the common sense test,” Peters said.

Gerhard, who owned his own roofing company before he was elected commissioner, said small-business owners need access to capital to succeed. He recalled the assistance he received from JTNB.

“If I came in to get a loan, sometimes they’d laugh at me. But Craig knew Gerhard Roofing, knew we could make the payment. A lot of times you’d go to a bigger bank, and they wouldn’t lend you the money,” Gerhard said.