Efforts to land a Siemens-Westinghouse fuel cell plant and convince Citizens Bank to keep a major office presence in the Pittsburgh area led a list of top job attraction efforts by the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance in 2001. Verizon Wireless' decision to open a new customer service center in Butler County also is at the top of a list of 21 projects that PRA Executive Director Ronnie Bryant believes helped make the year a success for the regional economic development and marketing agency. Bryant joined the PRA during the year, coming from a similar post in St. Louis. The projects helped create or retain about 3,100 jobs and spark $208 million in capital investment in the region, Bryant said in a newsletter on the agency's activities distributed to PRA board members, regional stakeholders and members of news organizations. According to the PRA, those figures are an increase over last year, when 17 projects were responsible for retaining about 2,930 jobs and sparking $62.4 million in capital investment. "What we have accomplished is comparable to other cities of our size," said Bryant. "I am very comfortable with what we did this past year." Among projects claimed by the PRA are: Citizens Bank, which purchased the retail banking operations of Mellon Bank this year. The Rhode Island-based bank in November announced its decision to locate its western Pennsylvania headquarters in Pittsburgh. It employs 900 people, most of them former Mellon employees, at the Three Mellon Center building in the city's downtown. Verizon Wireless, which became one of Cranberry Township's largest employers when it moved 800 employees into a new building in the Cranberry Woods office park. The Siemens-Westinghouse decision to locate its planned fuel cell plant in the Waterfront mixed-use development at the former Homestead Works property in Munhull. Bryant called the Siemens-Westinghouse deal "perhaps the most profound deal in the Northeast in years," because it could bring 500 jobs here, the PRA said. But the project also caused significant controversy for the PRA, when officials of Armstrong County, who thought they had the inside track on the new plant, criticized the lack of communication when the company started leaning to the Allegheny County site. Other job-producing projects cited by the PRA include: Cellomics, 300 jobs; Cricket Communications, 150 jobs; CombineNet, 100 jobs; Allegiance Telecom Inc., 85 jobs; and Blue Hammock, 80 jobs.

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