ktbs-33449462_elio_20161023

<http://www.ktbs.com/story/33449462/where-is-elio-meeting-scheduled-for-officials-to-tour-former-gm-plant>

Let me preface this by emphasizing that I'm all fired up about the typical readers' comments on these sort of local news pieces, and not nearly so bothered by the pieces themselves.

Frankly, I find myself reliably annoyed with the panic and outraged responses I see in news story comments all the time on this sort of topic. I'm not from their area, but I am in Normal, IL (though from the adjacent Bloomington) where Mitsubishi slowly killed their North American plant over more than a decade and a half of financial and managerial idiocy, then left and let it all sit. Don't know what the location-specific obstacles would be, but I know if there were a business- pretty much any business- that wanted that space and showed progress, even slow progress, I wouldn't be terrifically inclined to constantly badger them about not being fast enough, and how we were all promised good-paying jobs yesterday. (It's also not just a matter of jobs; property taxes on a properly assessed idle facility are likely to be /much/ lower than on an occupied space, even prior to active production. I assume Caddo Parish wouldn't simply turn down the revenue?)

It's not like there's a tremendous shortage in auto manufacturing plants- even just old GM plants- nor is there some great unmet demand for them or their capacity. There's another idled GM plant for sale in Janesville, WI, too- also a right-to-work state, like LA and unlike IL. (I don't know if the Janesville plant had stamping capability, but it was at least an assembly plant.)

Was the Shreveport GM plant shut down suddenly, or something? Nobody here was too surprised about MMMA closing shop, local press notwithstanding, but they'd been slowing down obviously for some time. (The plant actually had a peak capacity of about 240K units per year, but was running anywhere from 20K-70K for the last few years, if memory serves.) Maybe if your plant's closure came as a surprise, I could understand this attitude a bit better, but still...

Have the relevant governing and/or administrative bodies done much else to court other lessees? Did they sit on their hands after they got /one startup/ in there? Is it just that no one else really needs that sort of facility or space? Those are as valuable questions to ask of anybody as those they've already implied will be asked, if the average "Where's mah jobs?!" commenter is actually actively thinking.

Until that apparent inconsistency of concern is addressed, I'm calling either irrational panic or crap on all those sorts of comments, whether they were well-intentioned or not.