9 p.m.:Economic group funded, addressing continues

News First. News Fast.

By WARREN SCOTT, Staff writer

WELLSBURG - Brooke County commissioners on Tuesday agreed to provide support to a local economic development group and authorized Brooke County Sheriff Richard Ferguson to seek some help in assigning citystyle addresses to the county's residences and businesses.

The commission accepted, pending review by Brooke County Prosecutor David B. Cross, an agreement submitted by the Business Development Corp. of the Northern Panhandle calling for the county to provide $35,000 toward the groups efforts to promote economic development in Brooke and Hancock counties.

In recent months representatives of the BDC have announced plans to restructure to better represent all of Brooke and Hancock counties while seeking financial support from local cities and villages, whom they said will be represented on its new board of directors.

The municipalities were asked to make contributions based on their populations to support the hiring of an experienced economic development director.

The position has been filled since by Patrick Ford, an economic development leader in Pittsburgh and in communities in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and Florida.

In other business, the commissioners authorized Ferguson to advertise for a part-time assistant to aid in gathering data needed to establish the citystyle addresses for all residents and businesses in unincorporated areas of the county.

County officials have been working for several years to establish numbered street addresses, like those found in cities, for residents currently assigned numbered rural routes.

A mandate by the federal government, the numbered addresses are intended to aid delivery by the Postal Service and expedite response by police, fire and ambulance departments dispatched by emergency 911 call centers.

Plans call for each resident or business outside the county's cities to be assigned a numbered address based on their milepoint on a given road, so that emergency departments also can use an odometer to locate the source of the call.

Citystyle addressing in Brooke County was to be performed initially by a company that went bankrupt and later by a company hired by the state which, unsatisfied with the contractor's initial work, fired the business before the work was done.

The job has since fallen to the Brooke County Sheriff's Department, with 911 center dispatcher Marsha Kazienko charged with the task initially.

Ferguson said Brooke County Sheriffs Deputy Darin Pizer and Scott Ziegler, a dispatcher at the 911 center, have been involved in recent months but more help is needed.

Ferguson said the task of naming a number of county roads without names or renaming ones with the same or similar names as others in the same zip code has been completed.

He said he's purchased a machine to create signs for such roads and hopes to recruit workers in a summer youth work program to aid him in posting them.

Ferguson said it may be a year or two before residents and businesses are issued their new numbers.

See today's newspaper for more details.

(Scott can be contacted at wscott@heraldstaronline.com.)