FairPoint awarded contract to service health consortium

The largest land-line telecommunications company in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont says it has won a $16 million contract to provide telecommunications services for more than 400 health care facilities.

FairPoint Communications said the four-year contract supports the needs of the New England Telehealth Consortium.

The three-state consortium received a $24.6 million award from the Federal Communications Commission Rural Health Care Pilot Program to bring telemedicine to the region.

Participating health care centers will receive telecommunications upgrades while paying only 15 percent of the initial costs.

The network will deliver remote trauma consultation and link the 400 primarily rural health care facilities, including hospitals, behavioral health sites and community health care centers, in the three states to urban hospitals and universities in northern New England.

Bar Harbor Bankshares CEO, president will retire in June

The president and CEO of Bar Harbor Bankshares, the parent company of Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, announced his retirement Tuesday.

Joseph Murphy, who has led Bar Harbor Bankshares since 2002, said he will step down in June. The company has operated 15 bank branches in midcoast and Down East Maine since 2002.

Murphy said he plans to stay on the bank’s board of directors, and board officials said in a news release that they expect to renominate him at the company’s annual meeting next year.

Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, which has 223 employees, was founded in 1887.

Reid’s ‘fiscal cliff’ comments send U.S. stock market lower

Stocks slumped Tuesday after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was frustrated by the lack of progress in talks over the U.S. budget impasse in Washington.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 89.24 points to 12,878.13. The Dow and other indexes had been moving between small gains and losses for most of the day, then turned lower after Reid’s comments in the early afternoon.

“We have to get away from the happy talk and start talking about specific things,” Reid told reporters in televised comments.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 lost 7.35 points to 1,398.94 and the Nasdaq composite index lost 8.99 points to 2,967.79.

Worries about the budget talks have been hanging over the stock market for weeks. Stocks slumped immediately after the Nov. 6 election over concerns that politicians would be unable to reach a deal to trim the deficit before a Jan. 1 deadline.

If that deadline isn’t met, under current law a series of sharp tax increases and spending cuts will come into effect. Economists have warned that the measures could push the economy back into a recession. That deadline has come to be known as the “fiscal cliff.”

“The markets are getting whipped around, rather sharply, on headlines,” said Sal Arnuk, co-founder at Themis Trading. “For example, Harry Reid feeling we’re not making enough progress on the fiscal cliff.”

Last week, stocks pared some of the losses that followed the election.

– From staff and wire services