General Motors
'We put it all out on the table'
Pending GM closure looms large in Moraine city manager's mirror.
More on the imminent plant closing:
Sunday, December 21, 2008
MORAINE — City Manager David Hicks and colleagues have made trips to Detroit to meet personally with General Motors Corp. executives.
He helped shape a package of incentives to try to persuade GM to continue operating the Moraine plant where the company builds sport utility vehicles including Chevrolet TrailBlazers and GMC Envoys. He has made it a point to tell GM officials that their company is a valued corporate citizen in Moraine.
He talked with the union representing the plant's production workers to polish the relationship with the company. He has worked with state officials and congressional representatives in efforts to ensure a good working environment for GM.
But this week, GM is leaving for good. On Tuesday, it will shut down the monolithic Moraine Assembly plant that is the city's dominant employer and taxpayer, just a quarter-mile from City Hall.
"You may think it's discouraging," Hicks, 54, said during an interview in his City Hall office. "But really, I think we have an obligation to the public, to the workers and to everyone in the region to make sure we've made our best effort.
"We've made our absolute best effort," he said. "We put it all out on the table. If I could have thought of something else to do, we would have done it. We looked at what other communities were doing."
The nation's economic slump, and $4-a-gallon gasoline prices earlier this year, helped sink SUV sales.
"There are just bigger issues here than we can address," Hicks said.
The assembly plant gave up its third shift in 2006 and its second shift in September. The closing will wipe out all or most of the approximately 1,100 remaining jobs there. As recently as 2006 when the plant's work force totaled 4,000 people, they paid $17 million in state and local taxes.
Hicks, a former Moraine police chief who has been a city employee since 1975, said that after becoming city manager in 2001, he made it a priority to build a solid working relationship with GM, in good times as well as bad, to make clear to GM senior management that the company is valued in Moraine.
"He works hard," said Willie Thorpe, director of benefits for the International Union of Electronic Workers-Communications Workers of America, which represents GM Moraine's production workers. "He's even come and talked to us about any way he can help."
"Dave was way out in front of this, long before the current economic crisis and the current meltdown in the automobile industry," said Joe Tuss, Montgomery County's economic development director.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or
jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
