The Janesville Gazette reports that General Government Motors will be retooling its Orion, Michigan plant, which currently builds the Chevrolet Malibu and was slated to close later this year, to build its next-generation Chevrolet subcompact. The Orion plant beat out the already-shuttered Janesville plant, which built the Chevrolet Tahoe/Suburban (and GMC sisters), as well as the soon-to-be-closed Spring Hill, Tennesse plant, which makes the Chevrolet Traverse after being retooled away from the Saturn compact line.
Since there was no way that Government Motors would spare jobs in a Republican-leaning state, the race was really between Wisconsin and Michigan. When the business climate in Wisconsin is so bad that even a government-run operation won’t locate here, one has to wonder why we’re about to make it even worse.
Revisions/extensions (9:22 am 6/26/2009) – The Detroit News reports (H/T – FoxPolitics) that Orion offered GM a 100% tax break on new equipment and machinery for 25 years (up from a 50% tax break on same in an earlier offer) as well as a 50% tax break if it expanded the plant. Somehow, I doubt that it isn’t better than Jim Doyle’s offer (via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
R&E part 2 (9:33 am 6/26/2009) – The folks who run the NewsHub Twitter stream just let me know they’re still working on trying to find out what Wisconsin’s offer was.
A couple things to keep in mind; the Janesville plant is already a shell – GM auctioned off pretty much everything that could be unbolted, including items that would have been useful in building subcompacts. While the cost of stripping out the unnecessary tooling has already been borne, the fact that they will be starting with nothing more than a shell of a building has to also be taken into account.
Speaking of the shell of the building, the Janesville plant is the oldest facility recently used by GM, opening in 1919. The Orion Assembly facility opened at the end of 1983. The ages of the facilities also comes into play, especially since energy costs are about to go through the roof nationwide.
