Automotive supplier celebrates opening

Allevard Springs celebrated its grand opening in the Prichard Industrial Park.

Officials anticipated that by the end of the year 80 people would be working at the Wayne County facility, producing automotive suspension parts for Ford. In fact, the plant had already reached its 2006 target of 130 jobs.

“West Virginia’s excellent business network and the impressive collaboration among its international, state and local representatives have put our project way ahead of schedule,” said Emanuele Bosio, managing director of Sogefi, Allevard Springs’ parent company. “We chose the right location for our first U.S. facility when we came to West Virginia,” he said.

More than 20 other West Virginia companies supply products to Allevard Springs, including machine shops, insurance and information technology firms.

Funding supports WVU research expansion

A $24.4 million funding package will allow West Virginia University to complete a 12-year research expansion plan in as little as half that time.

The facilities will enable the university to add 600 new health sciences research positions over the next six to eight years. The funds will build new laboratories at the university’s Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center and new neurosciences laboratories. It also will create research space in the new Health Sciences Library.

The Infrastructure and Jobs Development Council will provide $9.4 million, the West Virginia Economic Development Authority $9 million and the West Virginia Housing Development Fund $6 million. Up to $3 million of the Infrastructure Council’s allocation will be forgiven if WVU meets its job creation target.

“With this up-front financing, we can build facilities that will be among the most advanced at any health sciences center or research institute in the country,” said Robert M. D’Alessandri, M.D., WVU vice president for health sciences. “That will attract top researchers, and they will bring an influx of federal and private research funding to WVU.”

Construction starts on memory research facility

A groundbreaking ceremony marked the start of construction on the $30 million Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute, the only major nonprofit institute in the world focusing on human memory.

With a target completion date of 2006, the facility on the campus of West Virginia University will be home to scientific laboratories and offices.

Auto parts supplier opens first U.S. site

CapreWest Inc. announced the opening of the company’s first U.S. production site in a $1.2 million investment at the Huntington Industrial Center.

The Cabell County facility will manufacture steel bars, supplying Allevard Springs USA in the production of automotive suspension parts and creating as many as 30 jobs. Allevard Springs, whose parent company is Italian firm Sogefi, began production this year in the Prichard Industrial Park in Wayne County.

“West Virginia provides our company with a strategic location,” said Ramon Santamaria, plant manager for the Huntington facility. “During an intensive study as part of our decision-making process, we realized that West Virginia’s location in the automotive corridor gave us access to customers and new markets as well as to our suppliers.”

CapreWest is a project of Grup Capresa, a Spain-based group of metallurgy sector companies.

Polyeurethane manufacturer opens

Stockmeier Urethanes USA, Inc., announced the opening of the company’s first U.S. production site at the 29,000-square-foot Harrison County shell building in the Business and Technology Centre.

As many as 20 jobs will be created once the company is operating at full capacity, expected within the next three years.

The Harrison County facility will develop, manufacture and distribute polyurethane systems, said Edwin Martinkat, managing director of Stockmeier Urethanes GmbH & Co. KG.

“We are so pleased to celebrate today not only the opening of a new facility but also our partnership with state and local representatives, which provided support throughout the process,” Martinkat said. “West Virginia’s experience in our industry as well as its location near key markets and suppliers made our decision to locate here an easy one.”

Stockmeier Urethanes manufactures polyurethane products such as coatings, adhesives, sealants, elastomers, castings and binders for such industries as electrical, filter and sports flooring.

Food products manufacturer breaks ground

Tasty Blend Foods marked the groundbreaking on a new, 58,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Putnam Business Park, the first of several phases.

Eventually, the building will be expanded to about 80,000 square feet. The $3 million project will result in the addition of as many as 50 new jobs to the company’s existing 22 jobs over the next three years.

Tasty Blend Foods, Inc., manufactures a line of high-quality dry baking mixes and gravy sauces.

“West Virginia continues to offer the quality resources needed for our success: an unbeatable team of people to make our products and a responsive hardworking group of local and state economic developers,” President Roy D. Elswick said. “This project will allow us to provide customers with high-quality products that have a ‘made from scratch’ flavor and texture.”

Amazon.com adds jobs at Huntington site

Amazon.com announced the addition of 200 jobs at the online retailer’s Huntington call center.

The new hires will handle questions and customer service via the phone or e-mail from customers buying merchandise on Amazon’s Web site.

Some of the employees will be seasonal, but most will stay on permanently, said Chris Grieser, Amazon.com’s site director. While the number could change, Grieser said Amazon.com will likely retain 175 of these new positions after the holiday shopping season.

Amazon.com is increasing its work force to accommodate new services and products offered by the company. The Christmas season especially necessitates an increase in its work force with Amazon.com seeing sometimes as much as five times the daily traffic, Grieser said.

After the holiday season, officials with Amazon.com anticipate the center will employ 350 people.

Creo Inc. expands West Virginia plant

Creo Inc. will more than double the capacity of its West Virginia printing plate manufacturing facility to meet the rapidly increasing demand for Creo plates by constructing an additional state-of-the-art lithographic plate production line at the West Virginia facility.

Construction of the new production line is expected to be completed by the end of 2005.

West Virginia export growth rate exceeds U.S.

According to U.S. Department of Commerce figures, West Virginia exported $1.75 billion in products during the first six months of 2004 compared to $1.2 billion in exports during the first six months of 2003.

This 46.79 percent increase exceeded the U.S. growth of 13.6 percent during the same period. Only four other states experienced a higher growth rate than West Virginia.

The export growth spanned a variety of industrial sectors and geographic regions. Export of electrical machinery, automotive components, aircraft parts and other manufactured products showed significant improvement. The export of West Virginia’s commodities such as coal, chemicals, plastic resins, hardwoods and steel also demonstrated impressive gains.

Of West Virginia’s top 10 markets, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Italy and Taiwan showed the most dramatic growth.

West Virginia cities on European investment list

Charleston, W.Va., is 19th on Expansion Management magazine’s list of the top 50 cities for European investment.

The state appeared on the list in three other places: at No. 26 as the Washington-Arlington, Alexandria, D.C.-Md.-Va.-W.Va. area; at No. 29 as Jackson County, W.Va.; and at No. 45 as Parkersburg-Marietta, W.Va.-Ohio.

Kokomo, Ind., topped the magazine’s list because of a $378 million investment by Daimler-Chrysler.

Marshall medical school received NIH grants

Marshall University received a $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund cancer research and the creation of the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence within the school of medicine.

The center, which will move into the new Robert C. Byrd Biotech Science Center in the fall of 2005, will conduct extensive cancer research.

“This grant is a tremendous boost for cancer research,” said Dr. Richard Niles, chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the medical school.

Earlier, NIH awarded MU’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine a $16 million grant.

Marshall, as lead institution, will work in partnership with West Virginia University to support a research network of seven of the state’s undergraduate colleges and universities.

“This grant will increase the state’s capacity to do competitive biomedical research,” said Dr. L. Howard Aulick, associate dean for research for Marshall’s School of Medicine and vice president for research at MU. “It will bring new faculty and new technology to the participating schools, and it will give their students the opportunity to do front-line biomedical research on cardiovascular disease and cancer, which are huge issues for our state.”

In addition to Marshall and WVU, the participating schools are Fairmont State University, West Liberty State College, West Virginia State University, Wheeling Jesuit University, Bluefield State College, Alderson-Broaddus College and Shepherd University.

MU Forensic Science Center gets $3.3 million

Marshall University’s Forensic Science Center received $3.3 million in funding secured by U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., to provide assistance to forensic crime laboratories.

The appropriation will provide opportunities for national outreach.

The Forensic Science Center serves as a national resource for the forensic community as part of the Forensic Resource Network (FRN), a program funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) providing research, evaluation tools and direct services to crime laboratories to improve their abilities to solve crimes.

Grant will help develop firefighters' suit

Extreme Endeavors, currently developing a suit to let firefighters communicate with those outside the fire, won a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research Grant through the National Institutes of Health to continue with work on the suit. The award was the first of its kind to a West Virginia company.

Morgantown’s MD Biotech received three SBIR grants totaling nearly $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help develop its ocular scanning instrumentation. The OSI will identify, analyze and quantify attributes in a person’s eye to determine his or her health.

West Virginia opens first ethanol blend station

West Virginia now boasts its first public E85 fueling facility at Dulaney Oil Co., 144 Dents Run Road in Morgantown.

“We believe this is a positive move we’ve made,” said owner Mike Kelly. “The fuel is made locally and our farmers are benefiting from it.”

The station also offers diesel, kerosene and unleaded gasoline. It is about one mile off Interstate 79 in Morgantown.

Dulaney Oil is also the bulk supplier for the Department of Energy’s E85 tank about three miles away. The 1,000-gallon storage tank fuels about 15 flexible-fuel vehicles.

E85 is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. The fuel is used in Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFV) specially designed to use fuel blends ranging from gasoline to E85.

Every domestic automaker produces a range of E85-capable FFV models. Several foreign automakers also offer such vehicles to American consumers. For more information about E85, visit www.E85Fuel.com.

LIFE magazine to be printed in West Virginia

Wisconsin-based Quad/Graphics, the nation’s largest printer of weekly magazines, has agreed to print the majority of LIFE.

Under the agreement, three Quad/Graphics’ plants including the Martinsburg, W.Va., location collectively will print 6.6 million of the 12 million copies per week.

Quad/Graphics also prints Time Inc.’s four other weeklies: Sports Illustrated, People, Time and Entertainment Weekly.

Smithsonian adds links to MU libraries’ exhibits

Links to five MU Libraries’ digital exhibits appear on the Smithsonian Institution Libraries Web site, “Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web.”

More than 3,000 library-related exhibits from more than 25 countries are listed and almost 20,000 people visit the site annually at www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/Online-Exhibitions/.

The exhibits include “1937 Flood, Huntington, West Virginia: A Visual Experience”; “Buffalo Creek Flood, 1972”; “Camp Washington-Carver”; “Old Main,” and “Cass, West Virginia History.”

West Virginia schools on U.S. News lists

West Virginia University and West Virginia University Institute of Technology are among the schools with the best undergraduate engineering programs in the nation, according to the 2005 edition of “America’s Best Colleges” from U.S. News & World Report.

WVU Tech’s engineering program is among 16 schools tied for 54th of 54 institutions offering bachelor’s or master’s degrees. This is the fifth year Tech’s engineering program has made the list.

WVU’s undergraduate engineering program is ranked 99th among 126 listed schools offering doctoral degrees.

Marshall University is ranked as a “Top School” among all southern master’s universities with a rank of 13th on the report. The university is ranked 43rd among all public and private schools in the category. The university also ranks 16th (tied) among the southern group of schools and is tied for seventh among public master’s universities in the south in Peer Assessment. U.S. News’ Peer Assessment is a rating of schools in the opinions of presidents, provosts and deans of admissions from other master’s universities in the southern region.

Lockheed Martin to build fingerprint system

Lockheed Martin has been awarded a five-year contract by the Department of Defense to configure, build and maintain a new Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) that will consolidate, store and search fingerprint data collected worldwide by the department.

This new system will be patterned after the successful Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which Lockheed Martin developed and now maintains for the Federal Bureau of Investigation at its Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, W.Va.

Today the IAFIS biometric database is the largest of its type in the world, providing its users fingerprint and criminal history data on more than 47 million subjects.

The Defense Department will initially locate its ABIS in West Virginia, where Lockheed Martin will leverage existing support and expertise, using proven processes and procedures successfully matured in support of the FBI system.

MU gets grant for transportation research

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA) announced a $1.8 million grant to the University Transportation Center (UTC) at Marshall University for its study of transportation and economic development in mountain areas. The Nick J. Rahall Appalachian Transportation Institute (RTI) will administer the grant.

Workforce centers honored nationally

The Region 1 WORKFORCE West Virginia Career Centers received the Workforce Development Award for Excellence – Rural One-Stop System from the National Workforce Association.

The award is presented to the One-Stop System responsible for developing and achieving the nation’s workforce goals within a local area.

One-Stop Systems provide employers and job seekers with information and access to a comprehensive range of employment programs and services including education.

Part of the criteria for this prestigious award is for the One-Stop to engage the business community and leadership, involving public and private industry, in developing programs and services. The award also recognizes the One-Stop’s ability to effectively respond to employer demand in the marketplace for competent employees.

Region 1 covers the 11 southeastern counties of West Virginia.

West Virginia preschool spending increases

The National Institute for Early Education Research’s “The State of Preschool: 2004 State Preschool Yearbook” shows that West Virginia increased spending per preschool child from the 2003-2004 school year over the previous year.

The percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool increased from 29 percent to 32 percent during the period, as well.

The state ranked 18th in resources devoted to preschool, the report showed.

“State-funded preschool has vast potential to contribute to economic growth and prosperity,” the report writers said.