Business news in brief

The death of a construction worker who fell 45 feet while performing repairs on a Philadelphia church roof in June has led to 10 safety violation citations, including three for allegedly willful violations, against James J. McCullagh Roofing Co. in Jenkintown. The U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the company with failure to provide adequate fall protections and fined it $71,600, which it can appeal. The company's listed phone number was not working. - Jane M. Von Bergen

First Niagara Financial Group, the Buffalo, N.Y., company that operates former Harleysville National Bank offices in the Philadelphia suburbs, confirmed that it is cutting up to 170 branch managers and teller supervisors at its nearly 450 branches across four states, as branch traffic drops and more customers bank online and by phone. At some branches the ranking officer will be a "service manager" with limited management responsibilities, First Niagara retail banking chief Mark Rendulic said. - Joseph N. DiStefano

Peco and the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, set winter energy delivery records during Tuesday's arctic onslaught. Peco customer demand for electricity reached 7,148 megawatts, breaking its previous record of 6,852 MW set on February 5, 2007. Customer demand for natural gas totaled 759,550 thousand cubic feet (mcf), surpassing the 2000 record daily send-out of 718,362 mcf. PJM said the grid, which serves 61 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia, set a new record for peak winter electricity use on Tuesday of 141,312 MW. With temperatures rising on Wednesday, PJM lifted its request for customers to conserve power. - Andrew Maykuth

Arden Group, a Philadelphia-based real estate group, agreed to pay $43.5 million, or $171 per square foot, for 100 and 200 Four Falls Corporate Center in West Conshohocken, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The complex, which is 24 percent vacant, had been given up to a debt investors' trust after its former owners, the California teachers' pension system and its real estate manager, stopped payments on nearly $100 million borrowed to buy the complex. Arden confirmed that it bought the property, but did not note the price. Starwood Property Trust financed the sale, according to Arden's statement. - Joseph N. DiStefano

The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board fined Harrah's Philadelphia Casino & Racetrack in Chester $70,000 for violating credit procedures from July 2010 to January 2013 and $20,000 for allowing an underage woman to gamble for two hours in April 2013. In the credit violation, the gaming board said Harrah's credit department failed to obtain authorization from a second approved before issuing credit and failed to separate the credit verification process from the credit approval process. - Harold Brubaker

According to meeting minutes released Wednesday, the Federal Reserve agreed last month to modestly reduce its bond purchases because of improvements in the job market that many Fed members felt would be sustained. Many participants called the job gains "meaningful," according to the minutes. Still, the minutes of the Dec. 18-19 meeting showed that some participants worried that investors might misread the move as a step toward raising the Fed's key short-term interest rate, which did not change. - AP

Macy's Inc. announced a restructuring including 2,500 layoffs and five store closings in a bid to trim costs by $100 million a year beginning in 2014. None of the department stores slated for closure are in the Philadelphia area. The Cincinnati-based retailer said that comparable-store sales, a key indicator of health, were up 3.6 percent during November and December compared with a year earlier, and that the planned cuts would boost profit while allowing for reinvestment in growth areas such as online commerce and the opening of new Macy's and Bloomingdale's stores. - Maria Panaritis

Aereo Inc., the New York company that streams broadcast-TV stations over the Internet, raised an additional $34 million in financing, bringing its total venture funding to $97 million. Broadcast-TV companies have sued in federal court to stop Aereo's national rollout, saying the company's business model is based on taking their content without paying fees. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether it should take the case. - Bob Fernandez