Tribune Chronicle / R. Michael Semple A sign on a General Motors-built Saturn outside the GM Lordstown complex said it all during a gathering Wednesday afternoon along Bailey Road.

WARREN — It took more than a decade, but the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., which the company announced would close in 2007, is finally being torn down so the land it sits on can be turned into an industrial park.

There, the cars were too big. In Lordstown, the cars were too small.

There they begged for GM to come back for years. Here, they’ve begged for months.

To be or not to be

“We were in this kind of weird purgatory state,” said Gale Price, head of economic development for the city of Janesville. “The big man leaves and what does a city do? How do you recover from that? It is no small feat.”

Instead of formally closing the plant, the United Auto Workers union argued for and was given — perhaps to the detriment of the area’s economic development — plant “standby” mode, just in case GM needed the extra space to throw a car together or GM changed its corporate mind. It never happened. In 2016, GM and UAW contract negotiations authorized the sale of the Wisconsin plant.

The Lordstown plant — which ended production of the Chevrolet Cruze and nearly all operations Wednesday — may be in danger of sitting empty in “unallocated” status. Not for sale. Not hiring. Not producing. Just 6.2 million square feet on more than 900 acres of land sitting carefully positioned by the Ohio Turnpike, in a “state of readiness” with a skeleton crew to repair machines that aren’t being used, according to a GM spokesman.

The final fate of the plant in Lordstown is expected to be decided at UAW contract negotiations in September. UAW Local 1112 President Dave Green said employees should “have hope, have faith” that the plant won’t permanently shutter, as hundreds of workers take or contemplate taking jobs at GM plants that haven’t met the same fate.

Efforts to change the market mind of the large corporation weren’t successful in Janesville — even though the working-class town of 63,000 sent delegations and wrote letters and directed their representatives to fight the decision, just like here.

“It was challenging because a sector of the community wanted to believe they were coming back, but everything I was reading about the car production industry told me it wasn’t going to happen,” Price said.

“There is a legitimate reason to be concerned with the unallocated status because it limits options in terms of what could happen, what is best for the area and what is best for the workers. It would be best for the area if it were used for production of some kind,” said Albert J. Sumell, a professor of economics at Youngstown State University.

The easiest solution would be for GM to decide to produce something else at the site, even as the workers disperse to find new jobs or transfer to plants out of state, Sumell said.

In Janesville, many employees moved or commuted from the area to GM plants out of state while waiting to see if some new product would come to the Wisconsin plant. According to news reports from the area, some left the state for factories in Indiana and Kansas. People in Ohio are moving to Tennessee — where GM has invested $2 billion in the Spring Hill plant.

Sumell said there is a “high chance” GM isn’t going to switch gears and announce a new product for the Lordstown plant. The best bet is to get another manufacturer into the space quickly, Sumell said, because remaining long in the “unallocated” status could hinder future development of the site.

The impact

In Janesville, where what is considered a living wage is about a dollar more than in Trumbull County, a job at General Motors was a secure one that offered working-class men and women with limited higher education some of the best wages in town.

When GM left, Price said, officials in Janesville knew it would be a hard blow to combat.

Unemployment shot up from around 5 percent to over 12 percent when GM ended production of some of the company’s larger vehicles and trucks after operating in what was the oldest GM factory in the country at the time.

Unemployment in the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman metropolitan statistical area was at 6.4 percent in December, the latest month data was released by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. It was an average of 6.5 percent in the area in 2016, before shift cuts at the plant took place, and the average was 7.1 percent in 2017, after cuts started.

An economic impact study conducted by Cleveland State University found the total impact of the loss of the three shifts — through jobs lost directly, indirectly and induced — would be about 7,700.

That could send the unemployment rate in the joint Mahoning and Trumbull county area to around 10 percent. Those are levels not seen since 2011, according to calculations based on the size of the workforce and existing unemployment numbers.

It is likely to take time for the full indirect and service-related jobs to be fully realized, even though some GM suppliers in the statistical area have already started cutting.

Now, unemployment in Janesville is lower than it was pre-GM, about 3.2 percent, Price said. The national average is about 4 percent.

“Janesville is stronger today than when they lost the GM plant years ago, not because the loss of the plant was a good thing for the economy, but in spite of it. It shows that an economy can recover from a significant loss of a major employer. It just takes time, organization and concerted effort,” Sumell said.

Stronger today

To get there, the community members came together to create an economic development alliance incorporating the city, other nearby communities, the county, higher-education organizations and existing economically focused organizations like the local chamber of commerce, Price said. The Rock County Development Alliance offers resources and partnerships with groups that help with small business and workforce training, in addition to a myriad of information for companies looking to set up shop there.

“We set out to identify the assets we had in place to capitalize on. We knew we weren’t going to suddenly change the whole landscape of the community,” Price said.

The group focused on advanced manufacturing like welding and metal fabrication, the service industry and technology-based businesses, the health care industry and other businesses like distribution centers and food processing companies that could take advantage of the area’s supply-chain infrastructure, Price said.

And the group focused on marketing itself to companies.

“We have good sites for large distribution centers and access to a number of large metro areas — many of which are within a day’s drive so trucks can be sent out and come back in the same day. We are centrally located and have a good freeway system that isn’t too congested,” Price said.

Trumbull County has many of the same assets, Sumell said.

But the problem, Price said, is many of the jobs that were available for people with experience in the GM factory, but little to no training with other skills, created a wage gap.

Ex-GM employees were accustomed to wages around $25 to $30 per hour, Price said.

While the area’s positions in advanced manufacturing — robotics, programming and hand welding — pay a similar wage, a gap emerged in the types of new jobs the group ushered into the area.

To try to guard against wages that can’t support a family without forcing them to rely on public assistance for food or medical care, the city only allows tax-incentive packages to companies that promise a living wage — approximately $16 per hour for a family of two adults and two children in Janesville.

A living wage is almost $15 in Trumbull County for a family of two adults and two children, according to a living wage calculator designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The housing market in Janesville is more expensive than it is in Trumbull County, Price said.

Trumbull County doesn’t tie its tax incentives to a living wage, but require a wage around $11 per hour, said Nicholas Coggins, director of economic development for the Trumbull County Planning Commission. Trumbull County commissioners just last week approved a 10-year, 75 percent tax abatement for a new TJX HomeGoods distribution center in Lordstown where the wages for the 1,000 workers expected to be hired over the next several years will be a minimum $11 per hour, although some may be more.

A new Dollar General distribution center in Janesville has to pay its workers about $16 per hour, Price said.

“We wouldn’t ask our city council to go without taxes so we can invest in $10-an-hour jobs. If we want investment in the community, the jobs we back with tax breaks need to pay a high enough wage that their employees aren’t put on an assistance track. We want the employees to have buying power. I don’t feel comfortable going to my city council and asking them to invest in a company that won’t invest in their workers, forcing the taxpayers to subsidize what they are not paying,” Price said.