What to do with a Vacant GM Plant?
With GM in bankruptcy and the future cloudy for the automotive titan, we can only speculate on what will happen to the six General Motors plants that are still in operation in the Southern Automotive Corridor. Those plants, located in Kansas City, Kan., Wentzville, Mo., Bowling Green, Ky., Spring Hill, Tenn., Shreveport, La., and Arlington, Tex., could end up like another GM plant that closed in the South three years ago; Vacant. And in an economy like this, there’s not much of a market for multi-million-square-foot former automotive factories. Or is there? In 2006, GM closed its 3.8 million-square-foot Oklahoma City assembly plant leaving local and state officials wondering what to do with the monster facility that sits on 430 acres. But they didn’t wonder for long. Through the leadership of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, the city, county and state rallied to purchase the plant and repurpose it to support the community’s thriving aerospace industry, or more specificall
