LORDSTOWN, OHIO — Twenty years ago, this General Motors plant was humming with 10,000 men and women assembling vehicles within its expansive plant in the Mahoning Valley. Two years ago, they were still making cars, but those jobs had shrunk to 1,500, a slim fraction of that number, making the 6.2 million square foot building seem hollow and haunting.
Then came the news in the fall of 2018 that GM was shuttering the plant forever, and by March of last year, the last GM-made vehicle, a white Chevy Cruze LS with a black interior, rolled off the production line at the assembly line here.
Both locals and union workers on the assembly line openly wept.
Once again, the region felt the painful and familiar economic devastation they have been experiencing since Sept. 19, 1977, colloquially known as Black Monday, the day when thousands of men and women lost their jobs when all of the mills closed up and down the Steel Valley, all in one day.
“At that time, all hope was gone,” said Rep. Tim Ryan in an interview with the Washington Examiner. The Ohio Democrat tried desperately to convince GM to not idle the plant; when that didn’t work, he tried desperately for a new direction for the facility.
“I was hopeful — sometimes around here, hope is your only option.”
Just three months ago, a drive here showed that hope had given up, at least by the locals. An oversized “SAVE THE GM PLANT” sign written in black spray paint faced the highway. Scrolled over top of that aspiration was defeat; “R.I.P.,” it read.
Ryan didn’t just have hope; he said he had been working behind the scenes to bring life back to the plant, and a different manufacturing future to ‘the valley’ in the form of the production of electric vehicles.
That will all be unveiled today when the newly formed Lordstown Motors rolls out its first electric pickup truck, called the “Endurance,” at the plant.
“Welcome to voltage valley,” he said.
“We were just trying to do everything we can to help this company gets started,” said Ryan of Lordstown Motors, a $2.3-billion project that came out of a joint venture that GM formed with LG Chem to build an electrical battery plant here.
Ryan has been a staunch proponent in changing attitudes and attracting capital to Rust Belt regions for investment in high-tech manufacturing. In 2018, Ryan took Silicon Valley venture capitalists on a tour of Rust Belt cities from Youngstown to Toledo to change attitudes. In his “Comeback Cities” bus tour, he argued that the bulk of venture capital funds in our country goes to companies in three states (California, New York, and Massachusetts), while places like here in Ohio attract less than 2% of capital investment from venture funds.
“We think they got a great product,” he said of the series of obstacles that have plagued many businesses. “We want to try to help them get this Advanced Technology Vehicle loan, a low-interest loan that Elon Musk actually used. When I first talked to Steve Burns, the CEO, I mentioned the program, if he’d be interested in it. And he didn’t know anything about it. And so, we got him connected, and I don’t even know if they’ve officially applied because they were about ready to apply, and then, the COVID hit.”
“From the federal vantage point, what can we do to help them get off the ground here and those are really the two big things,” said Ryan.
The former Democratic presidential candidate said the community is very excited about it.
“Burns said he will welcome the UAW to come in,” he said. “Obviously, there’s going to be a training dimension to this, but he wants to make sure that they’re making what the UAW was making there as far as wages and pensions and all of that stuff. So, it’s really, it’s got all the elements of what the new economy needs to look like.”
To date, the project is projected to create 1,100 new manufacturing jobs and a pickup truck that Ryan says will be very appealing to locals alone: “It actually looks like a truck. A lot of Elon Musk’s vehicles and trucks, they look like spaceships. This looks like a truck that you could put a gun rack on and go hunting. And we believe that that’s really the advantage that this truck has.”
Drive around this area before the GM plant closed, and the Chevy Cruze was owned by seemingly everyone in the area. Ryan hopes to see the same loyalty to local craftsmanship with the Endurance.
Vice President Mike Pence will be on hand Thursday afternoon to the tour the plant and for the unveiling of what Ryan hopes is just part of the new technological future for “the valley.”
