Tag: Economy

WesBanco Says Data Taken From ATM

WesBanco says fraudulent activity following a security breach at an ATM in Ohio appears to be isolated.

WesBanco says a device was used to capture data from transactions at an ATM at the Ohio Valley Plaza in St. Clairsville, Ohio, from July 25 through Aug. 3.

The Wheeling-based bank said Monday in a statement that the breach didn’t affect customer data or branch and alternate channel transactions.

Debit cards have been reissued to a limited number of customers.

Local authorities and WesBanco are investigating the incident.

Faith Based Community Garden Helping Those In Need

The First Lutheran Community Garden is located on a small lot on the corner of 19th Street and Liberty Street in Parkersburg. The property used to be an apartment building, but when it was torn down, the church decided to purchase the land and start a garden. The mission of the garden is to make produce available to those who may struggle getting it otherwise.

It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, and with an hour to go until the free produce stand opens, people are arriving from all directions and from various neighborhoods in Parkersburg. The crowds are waiting for the free produce stand to open. Patricia Harman is one of the volunteers. She’s covered in dirt from working in the garden, and she has to shout over the growing crowds of people to be heard.

“I live alone so it’s really nice ‘cause I can just take one or two tomatoes and a mess of beans. So it makes it convenient for me,” community member Jane Couch said.

Tomato Plants Ransacked

When the church first started this garden in 2012, members of the community were free to go into the garden and pick the vegetables whenever they wanted. But about a month ago, the volunteers decided too many people had been ransacking the garden in the middle of the night for tomatoes. The volunteers decided to lock the gates and give out free produce at designated times.

Credit Jade Artherhults / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Recent theft has caused the church to lock the garden’s gates.

Another one of the main garden volunteers is church member Don Ery.

“From out at the other garden they have squash and cucumbers, and a lot of beans,” he said.

Match Made in Heaven

Public demand for fresh food began to get so high that volunteers started thinking about expanding to another space, explains Bob Friend, another volunteer.

“Last year, Don and I talked about it and we decided to try to have another garden because we found that the need here was much greater than we could provide with the small garden we had here.”

Bob and Don were then presented with the perfect opportunity to expand when a woman offered up her garden. Carlina Titus owns a piece a lot across town. She says she offered up her land because she was impressed with what the First Lutheran Church had done to build their first community garden.

“I would see them working there when I went to work in the morning and when I came home in the evening,” she said.

Carlina’s husband has early stages of Alzheimer’s, and their large garden was becoming too much for them to take care of.

Credit Jade Artherhults / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Bob Friend tends to the church’s second garden.

“So one day I just stopped and asked them because my husband said, ‘I’m going to have to let half of it grow over ‘cause I can’t use it,’ and I thought, ‘No not after it’s been tilled and used and everything else. That would be a shame.’”

Carlina and her husband’s garden is located just north of the Parkersburg city limits next to a busy two lane highway. It’s almost twice the size of the garden on 19th Street. Just this year, they’ve given away over 400 pounds of produce to the community.

Fresh Produce in High Demand

The Parkersburg free produce stand still runs out of food most days that it’s open, but the volunteers are now able to give away a lot more produce with the addition of Carlina’s garden.

“We picked cucumbers yesterday. There’s a whole row of cucumbers out through here and this is all squash,” Bob said.

Bob and I traveled back to the garden at the First Lutheran Church, where Patricia was beginning to stock the shelves of the produce stand. She filled the shelves with large ripe tomatoes, eggplants, green and yellow peppers, carrots and plastic bags filled with fresh green beans.

Credit Jade Artherhults / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
Produce doesn’t last long once it’s put in the stand.

Dexter Cunningham is waiting in line for vegetables. He says not only does he benefit from the garden, but his sister and her children do too. He gets them produce from the stand for them to pick up later.

“When it’s hot and you’ve got kids it’s hard to get out of the house. So I usually just get it and they come in on the weekends and get it from the house,” he said.

It’s a bit of extra work to hand food out personally, rather than just leaving the garden open for people to pick food on their own. But the volunteers who help run this garden, like Patricia Harman, say it’s worth the time to know that people in need are getting nutritious food that they wouldn’t get otherwise.

“Well, the lady who said ‘I haven’t had fresh vegetables in years because they’re too expensive’. So that was really, really nice that we could give her fresh vegetables,” she said.

Beckley, WV Airport Offers Flights to Popular Vacation Spot

A West Virginia airport is beginning to offer weekly flights to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The Register-Herald reports the flights originate out of Raleigh Memorial Airport near Beckley.

Airport Manager Tom Cochran says the airport has wanted to offer flights to Myrtle Beach for a long time. He says a survey through the Beckley-Raleigh County Chamber of Commerce showed that area residents were interested in traveling to Myrtle Beach.

Cochran says flights leave Beckley on Friday and return on Monday and cost about $100 round trip. The flight takes about 90 minutes and stops in Charlotte to pick up more passengers.

Cochran says about 75 flights to Myrtle Beach have been booked through August.

Antitrust Agreement Sets Conditions for Merger of Huntington Hospitals

 Cabell-Huntington Hospital is one step closer to acquiring St. Mary’s Medical Center. An antitrust agreement filed by Attorney General Patrick Morrisey’s office establishes a series of conditions for the acquisition.

At a news conference Friday, Morrisey said the agreement ensures the merger follows state and federal law while also providing access to affordable health care in the area through economic competition.

In November, the hospitals agreed to merge after the Catholic-affilliated Pallottine Missionary Sisters announced in August 2014 that they were dropping their 90-year sponsorship of St. Mary’s. 

Among other conditions in the agreement, Cabell-Huntington agrees that St. Mary’s will continue to operate as a free-standing, faith-based organization for seven years. Neither hospital would be able to increase service rates beyond the benchmarks established by the West Virginia Health Care Authority.

Additionally, if the combined operating margins of both hospitals exceed an average of 4 percent during any three year period, the hospitals’ rates will be reduced by the excess for the following three years.

While the Attorney General’s filing does not tie into the Federal Trade Commissions’ review of the acquisition, Morrisey said he hopes his office’s actions accelerates the FTC’s review of the case.

St. Mary’s has more than 2,600 employees and Cabell-Huntington has more than 2,500 employees, making them the first and second biggest employers in Cabell County.

Morrisey was joined for the announcement of the filing by Rep. Evan Jenkins, who said the filing will protect the interest of those in need of health care as well as those employed by the hospitals. 

Update: Sheetz to Keep W.Va. Pepperoni Rolls, But Wants Just One Bakery

Updated August 18th, 2015 10:00 a.m.

Following widespread public outcry, the convenience store chain called Sheetz has found a West Virginia bakery that can supply pepperoni rolls to all of its stores in West Virginia. Home Industry Bakery in Clarksburg has been selected as the bakery that will replace Abruzzinos and Rogers and Mazza for pepperoni rolls sales to Sheetz, beginning September 12th.

Updated July 30, 2015 at 5:10 p.m.

After intense public outcry, the convenience store Sheetz has apparently reversed its decision to end sales of a West Virginia bakery’s pepperoni rolls at its locations in the state.

In an interview Thursday morning with The Clarksburg Post, the convenience store’s director of brand strategy Ryan Sheetz confirmed that decision.

“West Virginia-based companies are going to provide West Virginia pepperoni rolls to all of our West Virginia Stores. That will remain unchanged. That is something we have heard loud and clear from our customers, and we couldn’t be happier to take that feedback to heart and execute upon it,” Sheetz told The Clarksburg Post.

Although Sheetz says their pepperoni rolls in West Virginia are currently supplied by three bakeries within the state, the Pennsylvania-based company says it’s their intention to reduce that to only one, according to a report from WBOY-TV.

Sheetz executives released this statement Thursday:

We want our customers to know that we listen to their feedback and truly take their opinions into consideration. Our goal is to ensure that pepperoni rolls made in West Virginia are in every Sheetz location in West Virginia. We are currently evaluating many potential West Virginia based partners to fulfill this need. These new partnerships will allow for a more consistent offer and ultimately a better customer experience. We thank our West Virginia customers for their honest feedback and their support during this evaluation process.

An employee of Roger’s and Mazza’s Bakery told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that the owner of the bakery received a text message Thursday morning saying the decision to cut their product from Sheetz’s stores had been reversed. She also confirmed that owners of the bakery were meeting with representatives of Sheetz Thursday to discuss the decision and would not be available for interviews with media until Thursday evening. 

However, one delivery driver for Rogers and Mazza’s says he was rejected from completing his deliveries Thursday at three Sheetz locations.

Original Post from July 28, 2015 at 5:25 p.m.

In Mountaineer Country, pepperoni rolls are so celebrated, they might as well be added to the state seal. In 2013, pepperoni rolls beat out Arizona’s Chimichangas, Iowa’s Bacon, Oregon’s Pear Tart, South Carolina’s Shrimp and Grits and Georgia’s Peach Cobbler as the most delicious state food in the country, according to CQ Roll Call Taste of America competition.

So it’s not really a surprise that West Virginians are very upset to hear that one convenience store chain, called Sheetz, could be dropping its West Virginia made pepperoni rolls.

The news came as a shock to Rogers and Mazza’s, a Clarksburg bakery that sells to company. 

Up until last Friday, the owners of Rogers and Mazza’s bakery were excited to see their business growing. The family owned bakery has roots in making pepperoni rolls that stretch back to the early 1960s.

“We started making pepperoni rolls back then, and we’ve grown to five states, and we currently are making about 20,000 pepperoni rolls a day.”

Dennis Mazza’s stepfather owns the bakery that was notified through an email from the Sheetz corporate office.

“Last Friday I logged on to my email right before the weekend, and there was an email from their corporate that said all bakeries, all direct store deliver bakeries, they will no longer need our services, they decided to go with a warehouse program and that another bakery would start delivering pepperoni rolls to their store,” said Mazza.

These warehouse said pepperoni rolls might come from a bakery in Pennsylvania. However, Sheetz–whose corporate headquarters are based in Pennsylvania–did not return a call from West Virginia Public Broadcasting to confirm that detail.

On social media, pepperoni roll aficionados have come down pretty hard against Sheetz for its decision. After the public outcry, Sheetz then invited Rogers and Mazza’s Bakery to a meeting this Thursday to discuss the future of the West Virginia pepperoni roll.

According to most sources, the Country Club bakery in Fairmont is credited with inventing pepperoni rolls around 1937. But many North Central West Virginians know the stories that their grandparents told them- that for years pepperoni rolls had been made by Italian coal miners’ wives, who sent pepperoni rolls with their husbands as they went to work for long hours, down into the mines.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article stated that the pepperoni roll became the state food in 2013. A House Concurrent Resolution in the state legislature was introduced that same year, but was never passed. 

Lottery Sales Top $1 Billion

For the 13th consecutive year, West Virginia Lottery sales have topped the $1 billion mark.

Director John Musgrave said Tuesday the lottery posted $1.16 billion in total sales for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Of that sum, Musgrave said more than $500 million went to state coffers.

Musgrave said money transferred to the state included $254 million from racetrack video lottery, $187 million from limited video lottery and $41 million from traditional lottery products, such as scratch tickets.

Musgrave said during the lottery’s 29-year history, nearly $3 billion has gone to education, nearly $1 billion to tourism and $1 billion for elders.

Exit mobile version