$1.7M grant will go
into Marshall plant
The city of Marshall will use a $1.7 million federal grant to renovate a shuttered facility to accommodate a frozen foods manufacturing company.
The grant from a division of the U.S. Commerce Department was announced Tuesday and will provide for upgrades to a former apparel factory that has been closed for several years.
The project will create jobs and strengthen the local economy, the agency said and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo noted the investment "will increase growth in the manufacturing sector by bringing good, quality, high-paying jobs that will better support families and strengthen the regional economy."
The Searcy County facility is a former Zacbac Apparel factory that made military and postal service uniforms and employed up to 100 workers.
-- Andrew Moreau
MLB team employs
Windstream services
Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians are turning to Windstream Holdings Inc. to service the team's cloud-network connections.
Cleveland will rely on Windstream's enterprise offering to access data-intensive sports applications without latency or interruption to give the team a competitive advantage in the league, a Tuesday news release said.
Windstream's service will allow the Guardians' staff, coaches, scouts and players -- spread among eight locations -- to access and disseminate real-time information such as players' statistics, team performance metrics and videos.
"Windstream Enterprise's [network] allowed for a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage the things that we were previously managing," said Whitney Kuszmaul, senior director of infrastructure and operations for the Guardians. "It gives us more flexibility in routing traffic and in syncing data to and from various locations, and it even enables us to onboard new services without having to adapt one particular site or another."
The sports analytics sector is projected to grow to a value of more than $9 billion by 2030.
-- Andrew Moreau
Arkansas Index ends
at 923.36, off 11.59
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, closed Monday at 923.36, down 11.59 points.
"Another quiet day for stocks, as the U.S. major indexes closed flat on Tuesday as investors await [today's] inflation report hoping for in-line or better than expected results that could jump-start the Federal Reserve's rate cuts," said Chris Harkins, managing director at Raymond James & Associates.
Shares of America's Car-Mart rose 3.8% to lead the index. Simmons First National Corp. shares rose 1.5%. Dillard's, Inc. shares fell 3.9% and Murphy USA shares fell 1.3%.
The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.