Rocky Mount officials are breathing a sigh of relief after PNC Financial officials said they will keep open RBC Bank's operations center there.

Although no decisions on job cuts have been made, PNC CEO James E. Rohr said today that the Rocky Mount center is a key part of the company's strategy in the Southeast.

"We need Rocky Mount," Rohr said. "We are going to maintain a significant operation there, because we don't have an operations center in the Southeast."

RBC employs about 1,000 employees in Rocky Mount, both at the operations center and at the bank's eight branches.

David Combs, Rocky Mount's mayor, estimated that 60 to 65 percent of RBC's workers there are employed at the operations center.

Combs and other city officials hope to meet with PNC officials in the next 10 days to discuss the bank's plans.

He said the fact that it is Pittsburgh-based PNC buying RBC, and not Winston-Salem-based BB&T Bank, is good news.

BB&T has an operations center in Wilson.

"Probably in the long run this is better for our community than if BB&T had purchased it," Combs said. "We probably are not going to be as substantially impacted as maybe we could have been."