Wrong number benefits Black River baseball

A wrong number and a text thread later, Black River Varsity Boys Baseball received a new benefactor.

When Anthony Fiorini, owner of Maverick Building Co., started receiving texts in a thread with about a dozen baseball moms, he could have quietly left the group chat.

After laughing at mistakenly being included in the thread, Fiorini talked with his business partners about the possibility of donating to cover the meal the group chat was talking about.

“I feel like there’s a lot of situations that could be ignored or leaned into,” Fiorini said. “It’s fun to see where things can go.”

Christy Ladina was mistakenly given Fiorini’s number by Black River’s baseball coach as a number for one of the moms who was organizing donations to cover the food needed for a doubleheader game. The group of moms usually provides food for about 40 people — the boys on both baseball teams, as well as the coaches, trainers and any parents that may wander by searching for a hotdog.

It was the third or fourth day of organizing the effort that Ladina got a thenanonymous text in that group chat from Fiorini — who said he may not be a baseball mom, but wanted to support what they were doing for the kids and wanted to cover the cost of the lunch.

“I was like ‘Oh my gosh, is this really true?’” Ladina said. “All the baseball moms and I started talking, I said I can’t believe how kind that is to step up and say that — let alone (not) be annoyed by multiple texts from the group chat.”

There were some initial doubts from the moms, who continued to plan for the meal in case Fiorini’s donation didn’t work out. But one of the partners at Maverick Building Co. drove to Ladina’s home in Spenser with a $150 Visa gift card.

Fiorini said he and others with Maverick Building Co. all played baseball and sports in high school and were happy to help the team out.

He said they’ve been invited to a game this season and plans to come to a game or two — as his company is already working on housing developments in nearby LaGrange.

Commissioners OK $4.3 million in federal funds to repair Gore Orphanage Road

DAVE O’BRIEN THE COMMUNITY GUIDE

The Lorain County Board of Commissioners voted April 14 to accept $4.3 million in state funding for the replacement of the Gore Orphanage Road bridge in Henrietta Township about 20 years after it closed.

The board awarded a $4,276,401 contract to Schirmer Construction of North Olmsted to replace the bridge, one-third of a mile south of Becker Road.

The bid was the best and “most responsive” of two bids received April 6, commissioners said.

The project entails both replacing the bridge and reconstructing the road south of the bridge, currently closed to traffic after a sheet pile wall failed at least 20 years ago.

The project is expected to be done by July 30, 2024. The money is federal highway funds passed down through the Ohio Department of Transportation and the County Engineer’s Association of Ohio.

The bridge has been closed for years after the sheet pile wall failed in the early 2000s due to alleged design flaws, according to the ChronicleTelegram archives. The matter ended up in court, Assistant Lorain County Engineer Robert Klaiber told the Chronicle in April 2017.

Over the years, there

THEME:

Amherst Historical Society

wasn’t enough money to repair the bridge and road at a cost Klaiber estimated at $3.2 million six years ago. The project waited in line for federal funding for nearly five years.

Commissioner Jeff Riddell, a Henrietta Township resident, also asked that he be allowed to see all the bids on such projects in the future “so we know we’re spending prudently.”

In other business, commissioners voted 2-1 to approve a $250,000, twoyear consulting contract with K.E. McCartney & Associates, an engineering firm in Elyria, for general sanitary engineering services in 2023 and 2024.

Klaiber said the firm does expert engineering design work for his office on a task-by-task basis.

Riddell voted no, saying he didn’t see the need for a two-year contract when the county’s 2024 budget hasn’t been approved yet.

Klaiber said his office could easily seek out one-year contracts in the future.

Commissioners also OK’d an agreement for the Mental Health, Addiction and Recovery Board of Lorain County to spend $132,225 to provide medication-assisted treatment to eligible Lorain County Jail inmates through September.

That program was started in late 2019 to help inmates with substance abuse disorders detoxify in the jail.