Roundup: FirstEnergy eyes landfill at shuttered coal plant in Greene County; Judge orders EDMC and feds to keep mediating on …
FirstEnergy eyes landfill at shuttered coal plant
FirstEnergy Corp. might reopen a coal ash landfill near its shuttered Hatfield's Ferry power plant in Greene County to store waste from its Bruce Mansfield plant in Beaver County.
The Akron-based company requested a change in its state Department of Environmental Protection permit for Hatfield's Ferry to accommodate waste from the Shippingport plant. The DEP on Tuesday scheduled a public meeting on that request for 6 p.m. May 21 in the Carmichaels Junior-Senior High School auditorium.
FirstEnergy must stop storing waste from Bruce Mansfield at the Little Blue Run site in Beaver County at the end of 2016 as part of a court agreement. The company plans to store waste in an abandoned mine in Fayette County but is considering the Hatfield's Ferry site as a backup, spokeswoman Stephanie Walton said.
The Hatfield's Ferry power plant closed in 2013. The landfill has about seven years' worth of storage capacity, Walton said.
Judge orders EDMC, feds to continue with mediation A U.S. district judge has ordered Education Management Corp. and federal prosecutors to keep working with a mediator to settle a whistleblower lawsuit that could cost the for-profit educator hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the first new filing in more than five months, Judge Terrence McVerry, of the Western District of Pennsylvania, on Tuesday ordered the Downtown-based company and prosecutors to report back by May 26.
The lawsuit was filed in 2007 by two former employees of EDMC, and joined by the U.S. Justice Department in 2011. It alleges that EDMC paid recruiters solely on the number of new students they enrolled, a violation of federal law.
First Commonwealth to buy Ohio bank for $14.75M
First Commonwealth Bank is pushing further into Ohio with a $14.75 million deal to buy Columbus-based First Community Bank.
The all-cash deal announced Monday will give Indiana, Pa.-based First Commonwealth a company with $100 million in assets and four branches in Ohio.
First Commonwealth CEO T. Michael Price said entering Columbus was a strategic priority for the bank, which has 107 banking offices in Western and Central Pennsylvania and a Corporate Banking Business Center in Northeast Ohio. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
Patriot Coal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
Patriot Coal Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday for the second time in three years and said it is involved in active negotiations for the sale of the company.
The company made the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It had emerged from an earlier bankruptcy case in December 2013 in Missouri.
Patriot said it will continue shipping and mining operations and it has received a commitment for $100 million in debt financing from secured debt holders that it did not identify. It did not specify potential buyers for the company.
The bankruptcy filing lists both the company's estimated assets and liabilities at more than $1 billion.
Coal-mining companies in central Appalachia have struggled in recent years, shedding jobs amid low natural gas prices, dwindling coal seams, competition from other states and weaker market conditions.
Wage growth may be on tap as more Americans quit their jobs
Americans are becoming more apt to quit their jobs, a government report showed on Tuesday, a sign that a stronger labor market and falling unemployment rate could result in healthier wage growth and inflation.
The three-month quit rate for non-government jobs rose to 6.6 percent, the report showed, the highest since the second quarter of 2008 and up from 6.5 percent in the final quarter of 2014. Both wages and inflation tend to follow a rise in the quit rate by a couple of quarters, research from the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank shows.
“Once the quit rate gets back to its pre-recession level, we could expect wage growth to be back to pre-recession levels within six to 12 months,” said Jason Faberman, a Chicago Fed researcher who co-authored the study. The three-month quit rate hit a pre-recession peak of 7.6 percent before falling to as low as 4.3 percent in the depths of the Great Recession.
Fed officials have kept interest rates near zero for years to try to boost hiring and bring inflation closer to its 2 percent target. But wage growth, at the intersection of the Fed's mandates of steady inflation and full employment, has remained stubbornly tepid.
Household debt levels steady
Household debt levels were mostly unchanged in the first three months of this year, held back by tight mortgage credit standards and consumer reluctance to borrow heavily.
Total household debt ticked up 0.2 percent to $11.85 trillion in the first quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday. That's a nearly flat reading after two quarters of increases. Household debt — which includes mortgages, student and auto loans, and credit cards — is still 6.5 percent below its 2008 peak of $12.7 trillion.
The figures suggest that lenders' high credit standards and reluctance among consumers to run up debt continue to weigh on the economy.
Investor group sells Rice Energy shares
An investor group is selling part of its stake in Rice Energy, the Cecil-based natural gas company said Tuesday.
NGP Rice Holdings, an affiliate of Texas-based private equity fund manager Natural Gas Partners, is selling up to 6.9 million of more than 20 million shares it owns in Rice, which went public a year ago. The sale would leave NGP with less than 10 percent of Rice's stock.
Natural Gas Partners said the sale price was $24.20 per share.
A Securities and Exchange Commission filing describing the sale did not provide a price. Rice stock closed up 66 cents at $25.12.
Other business news
• MSA Safety Inc.'s board elected CEO William Lambert to be its chairman, succeeding John Ryan III, who will continue as a board director. Lambert, 57, joined MSA's board in 2007 and was named CEO in 2008. He will continue as chief executive of the Cranberry-based manufacturer of safety equipment.
• Alcoa Inc. will close an Australian coal mine and power station in August after the aluminum maker failed to find a buyer for the facility. The power station, which employs 85 people, had provided about 40 percent of the electricity used by Alcoa's Point Henry smelter, which closed last year. The company expects to record a restructuring charge related to the closure of $30 million to $35 million.
