Moraine officials weigh life after GM
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
MORAINE — Local officials realize General Motors' departure will trickle throughout the region for years to come. The challenge will be to keep that impact from growing to a flood.
"We're going to up our level of recruitment as we focus on our existing businesses," said Michael Davis, the city's economic development director. The city plans to have a consultant on board by March to put together an economic development strategy while seeking new occupants for the former GM plant, he said.
Davis said the former Delphi site off Dryden Road is close to being put up for sale, which could eventually lead to its redevelopment.
The plant's closing on Tuesday, Dec. 23, is expected to cost the city 20 percent to 22 percent of its annual income tax collections.
The Kettering City School District, which serves much of Moraine, also is bracing for dwindling tax receipts.
The school district collects more than $600,000 in real-estate taxes from the plant each year, but GM wants the plant's current market value to be slashed from $91.25 million to $22 million as it becomes vacant, and the company wants that reduction to be retroactive to the first of this year.
In 2006, GM paid the school district $1.2 million in tangible personal property tax, a tax that is being phased out by the state. That amount is projected to be $369,000 this year, and nothing in 2009.
Reimbursement from the state, however, will insulate the school district from the effects of that tax's elimination until 2011, when the reimbursement will begin to disappear, said Steve Clark, the school district's treasurer and chief financial officer.
GM's departure also will drive up demand for health-care services as local workers lose their health insurance.
Premier Community Health, which provides health services for the uninsured and under-insured who meet income requirements, has given 352 mammogram vouchers in Montgomery County so far this year through its federally and state-funded Breast and Cervical Cancer Project. That's up from 127 last year, largely because of the troubled economy and businesses dropping health insurance for their employees, said Pam Reichel, PCH's executive director.
The loss of the Moraine assembly plant is the last chapter, and "probably the biggest and most devastating," in the disappearance of 20,000 to 25,000 automotive jobs from the region over the past decade, said Joe Tuss, an assistant Montgomery County administrator who oversees the county's economic development activities. And the challenge of redeveloping the plants' facilities, which have nearly 4 million square feet under roof, is huge, he said.
Still, Tuss said, the community has proven itself resilient. "We're going to have a more diversified economy, and that's going to be good."
