Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...profits for 1995 and 1996 totaled $11.8 billion. To put that figure in context, it would be enough money to run the West Carrollton schools, where most Moraine children attend classes, for the next 400 years. As 1997 gave way to 1998, GM dangled the possibility of yet another plant before the Moraine city fathers, and they jumped. This time the tax relief amounts to an estimated $28 million--or about $156,000 for each of the 180 new jobs to be created...
...necessarily. Other communities have showered tax breaks on GM and its partners, assuming they would create or at least retain jobs. They were wrong. Volvo-GM closed a jointly owned plant (GM was the minority partner) in Orrville, Ohio, in 1996--just seven years after the county cut property and inventory taxes in half. Some 400 jobs were lost. The two automakers moved operations to Pulaski County, Va., where millions of dollars more in economic incentives awaited...
...Ypsilanti Township, Mich., granted 12-year tax abatements on $250 million worth of new equipment and machinery that GM installed in its Willow Run assembly plant. On its application for the second tax abatement, GM said no new jobs would be created but 4,900 existing jobs "will be retained as a result of the project." A GM executive reaffirmed the company's commitment at a township board meeting...
...interviews with TIME, GM executives say they merely do what everyone else does. Moreover, they say, local and state governments often come calling on them. As a GM official explained, when Saturn was conceived, it was a clean sheet, a new type of plant representing a huge investment. Once it became publicly known what GM was planning, he said, "we received proposals from every state in the union except Hawaii and Alaska. We had file cabinets full of material from every state...Every one had to be responded to. It took on a life...
...illustrates another corporate-welfare story that TIME encountered repeatedly. After failing to keep a facility up to date, a company claims a plant is "archaic" and threatens to close it unless government officials come up with incentives to help pay for modernization. That is what happened in Louisville, Ky., where a much larger conglomerate, General Electric Co., said that to meet profit goals, its plant had to be modernized--with taxpayer dollars. This from a company that appears at the top of the lists of the "best managed" corporations in America, whose revenue last year reached $91 billion and whose...