Governor Phil Bredesen says it won’t be as easy as he’d hoped to attract a new General Motors project to the scheduled-to-be idled Spring Hill factory.
Bredesen hadn’t expected the state would have to fight all-out to bring production of GM’s new small vehicle to Spring Hill. But after speaking with GM officials in Washington earlier this week, the governor said, “I was wrong.”
Bredesen says several criteria will play into GM’s decision about where to build the car, but the main one the state can affect is how much money it offers GM up front.
“It certainly was a new look for me at how they’re approaching this thing, which is absolutely, ‘Tell me how big of a check you’re going to write.’ That’s not an area in which we have ever been very aggressive in – just writing front-end checks – and when we have done it’s usually been for training or infrastructure. They’re just asking us to help them build the plant.”
Bredesen says at minimum GM would like to see a few hundred million dollars, but that kind of money isn’t just laying around. The governor says the state must think hard now about how it responds to GM’s request.
EXTRA:
GM invested almost $700 million retooling the Spring Hill plant over the past two years. That provides the framework to produce different models there, but GM would still have invest further to change over.
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