Good day everyone, thank you for holding and welcome to the Community Bank System’s fourth quarter conference call. Before we begin today’s call, I’d like to remind you that this presentation contains forward looking statements within the provisions of the Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. They are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about industry, market and economic environment in which the company operates. Such statements involve risk and uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in these statements. These risks are detailed in the company’s annual report and form 10K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I would like to introduce today’s call leaders, Mr. Mark Tryniski, President and Chief Executive Officer and Mr. Scott Kingsley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Community Bank System. Gentlemen you may now begin.

Thank you Elaine, good morning everyone, thank you all for joining our fourth quarter conference call. I think we’ll change up the batting order a bit here for this call and I’d ask Scott to make his presentation first and then I’ll follow up with some comments as well. Scott.

Thank you Mark and good morning everyone. Our fourth quarter earnings of $11.8 million or $0.39 per share were $0.12 above the $0.27 reported in the fourth quarter of 2007. Solid loan growth, continued expansion of non-interest income sources and improved net interest margin and strong asset quality resulted in the approved quarterly core operating results. The fourth quarter results also included two significant non-operating items. The first, a $6.9 million or $0.23 per share benefit related to settlement of certain previously unrecognized tax positions. The second, a $9.9 million debt refunding charge comprised of the refinance of $150 million of Federal home loan bank advances into similar duration, lower cost obligations and the early termination of $25 million of higher cost trust preferred securities. Excluding these two items and utilizing an effective tax rate in line with the first nine months of 2007, operating results for the quarter were between $0.35-$0.36 per share. I’ll first discuss the balance sheet. We improved our average earning assets to $4.23 billion, slightly higher than the third quarter and up $254 million from the fourth quarter of 2006. We grew average loans by $133 million from last year, including $28 million in business lending, $76 million in consumer mortgages and $29 million in consumer installment products. Our average investments were $120 million above the prior year, demonstrating our current level of liquidity and an incremental investment leverage strategy initiated mid-year 2007, which we discussed last quarter. We increased average deposits $3.24 billion for the fourth quarter 2007, up 3.4% or $108 million above the prior year. Consistent with our focus on expanding core account relationships, $84 million or 78% of that full year growth was in checking, savings and money market instruments as well as demand products. Fourth quarter average borrowings of $919…

Thank you Scott. I’d like to make a couple of comments on the fourth quarter and then comment on the year as a whole. We’re pleased with fourth quarter performance in earnings which were up nicely over 2006, despite margin contraction. Loan growth for the quarter was unseasonaly [sic] strong with all of our portfolio showing growth. Non-interest income grew at a double digit pace and credit cost decline significantly as a result of improved asset quality. We also experienced net interest margin expansion for the first time since 2005, which goes without saying, is welcome news to us. So Q4 was a very good one for us in virtually every way. The tax gain was a welcome result and provided us the opportunity to think strategically about how to most productively deploy that added capital. We evaluated numerous alternatives, including securities leverage, a stock buyback, saving it for future opportunities and numerous others and concluded quite convincingly that a debt refunding was the most productive deployment of that capital. Beyond the economic net present value benefit, the refunding will improve future year’s earnings, net interest margin and return on equity, all of which we expect will be accretive to shareholder interests. With respect to 2007 as a whole, I would make similar observations. First, core operating earnings, which exclude the debt refundings and the tax gain, were up 6% over 2006. We’re pleased with that performance, particularly in the face of the not so gentle headwinds of the current operating environment. The reduction in net interest margin alone impacted us by more than $0.20 per share this year. Despite that hurdle, improved results were achieved through contribution across the company, including organic and acquired balance sheet growth, the accretive impact of our 2006 acquisitions, continued double digit expansion of…

Yes sir, thank you. If anyone does have a question or a comment, simply press one on your touchtone phone. Once again, a question or a comment, press one on your touchtone phone. The first guest today is Steve Moss from Janney Montgomery. Steve Moss – Janney Montgomery: Yes, good morning guys. Just a little question here, what are your expectations for the net interest margin exclusive of trust preferred refinancing as the Fed is likely to cut rates by 50 or 75 bips here going forward.

Steve, I think that as we’ve said that the debt refunding charge that we took related to both the FHLB borrowings and the trust preferred is likely to improve our margin by ten basis points in 2008. I think that in the environment of a falling rates environment, if the Fed is moving at basis point move that’s 50 at a time, yeah we have a hard time staying up with that in terms of lowering our funding costs fast enough to keep up with that drop as it effects our variable rates or prime based or LIBOR based assets. I think that’s a short term scenario for us in terms of impacting that result and that if we’re ever challenged in the first couple of quarters of 2008, if there were rates down, I think we’d be hopeful that we could make that up in the second half of the year. Steve Moss – Janney Montgomery: Okay and sounds like things are looking good on the asset quality front, any areas of concern?

Right now we really don’t have any Steve. Obviously in this environment we keep pretty close track of all of those metrics, in fact you look at the delinquency rates of all our portfolios, they’re right around 1% and it’s pretty much been there for the entirety of 2007. Our criticized assets have been stable all year long as well as you can see the charge offs were significantly less in 2007 and we think we’ve been pretty disciplined over the course of 2007 and even prior to that in the second half of 2006, we strengthened some of the lending standards, particularly in our auto installment or indirect auto lending business. We were writing in 2006, about 80% A and B paper, right now that’s up to almost 90% so the asset quality metrics, really across all our portfolios right now look very strong. As I said, it’s a difficult environment there with the subprime and the current credit markets and their impact across the financial industry but we think we’re pretty well situated. I would like to say again that I think that the asset quality metrics aren’t going to improve from here, and frankly that’s likely to be the case. The net charge off levels we had this year were just exceptionally low and we would expect they would normalize a bit next year but right now none of these delinquency or non-performing metrics are really indicating any potential asset quality turbulence in the near term. Steve Moss – Janney Montgomery: Alright, thank you very much, nice quarter.

Thank you Steve, the next guest today is Brett Morris from FTN Midwest, Mr. Morris your line is open. Brett Morris – FTN Midwest: Hey guys how are you doing today? I was hoping you could give me a little more color on where you saw personnel expenses going and maybe what the increases were this quarter?

Sure, I’ll take a shot at that Brett. In the fourth quarter for us, quite frankly, the jump up from the third quarter was really to square up a lot of employee benefit plan accruals and adjustments associated with incentive plans, pension arrangements, healthcare related benefit plans. I think that it’s probably pretty safe to assume that if you took somewhere between where we experienced in the third quarter, in the fourth quarter, that’s probably our, quote, moving run rate, with the expectation that our people were probably awarded the cost of living merit increase the first of the year. But in terms of people count itself, we actually have not had increases to the core banking business in terms of FTEs, all of our adds have come in the financial services businesses, primarily our benefits and plan administration business where those increased revenues, both acquired and organic, have required additional service capacity and we’re fine with that. If we continue to have to scoot up based on double digit increases in those businesses, which have a higher people cost compliment than the core banking business, we’ll continue to make those investments. Brett Morris – FTN Midwest: Okay, great and then also could you tell me what you’re thinking about your securities portfolio, I saw there was some pretty large decreases in the averages.

I actually think in terms of quarter over quarter we actually had a slight increase in the averages. I will say that the one undertaking that we did have in the fourth quarter, I think we mentioned in the third quarter call, we did do about $200 million of investment leverage in early August and initially deployed those assets into short term agency discount notes. As we were entering a rates down environment, certainly from an ALCO planning standpoint, it became much more productive for us to put some of those cash flows back into the investment portfolio into longer maturing items and for us, with our acumen in municipal securities, we’ve selected that group. Not only is it a valuable tax planning tool for us, but frankly there’s a little bit more slope to that municipal curve than there was to the taxable curve. So some of that redeployment has actually gone there. We are comfortable with where the securities portfolio stands in terms of its content and its size right now. But I will mention that we do have about $150 million of cash flows coming back off that portfolio early in 2008 and we’ll have to make a decision whether we want to redeploy those longer term or quite frankly use those on the case that if certificate of deposit or time deposits funding again doesn’t make market sense we may allow some more time deposits to actually run off, not to our core customers but in places where we just have rate choppers.

Which, just as a follow up to that, is something that we did in the fourth quarter because of the liquidity, the CDs that rolled off in the fourth quarter actually had a higher cost than the returns on the liquidity that we had which I think was in the cash and cash equivalents line. So it’s really an effort to very tightly manage our net interest margin which as you saw and I commented on, actually increased in the fourth quarter for the first time since 2005. What really drove that was a reduction in deposit costs. So we continue to manage that as tightly as we can. Brett Morris – FTN Midwest: Alright, great, thanks guys that’s all I had.

Thank you, currently there are no more questions in queue, so as a final reminder if you do have a question or a comment simply press one on your touchtone phone. Gentlemen I have no more questions in queue.

Great, thank you Elaine and thank you all for joining us, we will talk again in April.

That concludes today’s conference, thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.