Hope or Hopeless – Talk About a Useless Commuter !

Few places are more emblematic of the rise of American manufacturing, and its gradual decline, than this once-bustling industrial suburb of Dayton — within sight of the hill from which the Wright Brothers first tried to fly their innovative contraption, even before Kitty Hawk.

That was a century ago, and in time big stretches of the city were covered in factories. During World War I, more than 3,400 warplanes came off an assembly line in Moraine. The earliest electric refrigerators were mass-produced here, then cars and S.U.V.’s, and then suddenly very little.

In the weeks between Barack Obama’s election and his inauguration, General Motors closed the last big factory in Moraine, a four-million-square-foot plant that churned out S.U.V.’s. The 4,200 men and women who had worked there before the recession — representing nearly 2 percent of the work force in Moraine and the surrounding communities — lost their jobs and their wages, which were north of $20 an hour.

The president never sought to reopen the factory, even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in G.M. during the auto bailout. What he has done instead is try to ease some of the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve for the community’s wounds.

The ambassador, Edward B. Montgomery, executive director of the White House Council on Automotive Communities and Workers, has made 23 trips so far to troubled cities like Moraine. In lightning forays, he flies out of Washington in the morning, offers hope and aid, and returns to the capital in the evening. He concedes that he is not bringing jobs, but acting as a facilitator to help pummeled communities gain access to various government funds.

“The people are focused on how they can use their assets; they are not trying to capture G.M. coming back, but to go forward and build a new base,” Mr. Montgomery said in an interview after visiting Moraine last week.

During that visit, he told a gathering of local and state officials, “there may be some nontraditional, untapped sources of federal funds that we can help you tap.” He travels with an entourage of a dozen top officers from federal agencies, each with money to offer and an explanation of how to tap the funds.

“We are a means of coordinating across the agencies,” Mr. Montgomery explained, “and improving access to funding.”

On his travels he has helped to channel millions of dollars from the stimulus package and other government pools. He does not know, he says, just how many millions. At many of the stops, particularly in Ohio, which went for George W. Bush in 2004 and just barely for Obama in the last presidential election, there is an implicit political message in this largess. It goes something like this: Stick with the president and the Democratic Party, and while we cannot bring back mass production with its large-scale employment, we can help you in the transition to other sources of income and jobs.

“What they are doing is all well and good,” said Daniel Luria, research director of the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center. “But if you are one of the people in distress, what you really want is a national manufacturing strategy that insures that the share of what is made here does not continue to fall.”

Mr. Montgomery describes that thinking as unwarranted interference in the private sector, and counterproductive. “The question of whether you should order private companies to locate in these communities; that is not a prescription for success,” he said.

His approach has produced results that are hard to measure. He has visited Flint, Mich., for example, three times in the last year, and the unemployment rate remains above 25 percent. On the other hand, several hundred additional people are enrolled in job training as a result of stimulus money that Mr. Montgomery steered to Flint, according to the mayor, Dayne Walling. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving more quickly than it otherwise would have, the mayor said, to clear former factory sites for other commercial use.

“That was a thicket that Montgomery’s people helped us to navigate,” the mayor said.

Mr. Montgomery, 54, a labor economist by training who served as a deputy labor secretary in the Clinton administration, describes Moraine as a particularly good candidate for help because, in response to the G.M. plant closing, the city quickly put together an economic development plan that laid out, in advance of his visit, a transition away from autos.

The new target companies are not easy to lure, however. They are frequently sought by other communities in similar straits, including next-door Dayton, which lost NCR’s big headquarters last June. Renewable energy (companies that assemble wind turbines or solar panels) is high on the list of preferred industries. So is aerospace. Companies engaged in developing technology for health care would be good. The goal is to house new arrivals in Moraine’s vast, empty factories.

“If we are fortunate enough that private investors purchase the factories, we would work with the new owners to parcel out their use,” said Michael W. Davis, the city’s director of economic development.

Mr. Davis said that the 360-acre G.M. site, which includes the old S.U.V. plant and what’s left of an adjoining Delphi auto parts factory, is now drawing offers of $14 million or less, although the property is appraised by the city at $69 million. As for those who would actually occupy the space, leasing or purchasing parcels from new owners, “we have two nibbles so far,” Mr. Davis said. One group would “carve out” 10 acres for a truck terminal and the other eight acres for a marketing firm.

“We have to demonstrate that this is a region worth investing in, and we have to do that soon,” Mr. Davis said. “We have taken a 30 percent hit to Moraine’s tax revenues just in the last year.”

The trauma is evident driving through Moraine, a city of 7,000 with a daytime population of 20,000 in its heyday, when the G.M. plant was drawing thousands of workers from surrounding communities. That daytime population is fewer than 13,000 today, and the unemployment rate in the county has risen to 12 percent, from less than 7 percent in 2007.

The bungalow-style homes are often in disrepair and few are freshly painted. Streets and sidewalks downtown are nearly empty, even in midday. And many of the retail stores in the stately buildings around the town square are vacant, their darkened display windows like windows in mausoleums.

“The G.M. factory did not close all at once,” Mr. Davis said. “It went from three shifts to two shifts to one shift to none.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/business/economy/06stimulus.html?th&emc=th

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