By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com
JANESVILLE — Business, labor and civic leaders said Wednesday afternoon they’ve received positive feedback from GM leaders on their proposal to keep the automaker’s assembly plant open here.
But they acknowledge all their efforts may be for naught if Congress does not approve a $14 billion temporary bailout plan that would help keep GM afloat until early 2009. In Washington D.C. Wednesday evening, the House approved the proposal, but the emergency bailout remains in peril from Senate Republicans who oppose it.
Speaking at a Competitive Wisconsin board meeting, Tim Cullen — a former state Senate majority leader and a current Janesville school board member — said he hopes the plant will be retooled to produce fuel-efficient cars.
“Right now though, General Motors has other things to worry about,” said Cullen, who also served as a secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services. He leads the effort to keep GM in Janesville with former UAW Local 95 President Brad Dutcher.
“First, GM has to survive,” Cullen said bluntly.
“Still, I’m optimistic and I look forward to meeting with them again during the first quarter of next year. We will keep pushing this until they say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Cullen declined to detail any specifics of the plan presented to GM, which was crafted by a broad-based coalition that included business leaders, plus state and local officials and the UAW.
“If GM acccepts it, we’ll reveal the details,” he told a questioner. “If not, it will never become public. We just don’t want people picking it apart now.’
Mike Sheridan, incoming state Assembly speaker and another former UAW Local 95 president, said he believes the $120 million in annual savings offered by his union is a key part of the plan.
He said the savings come from work rule, overtime and other changes to the UAW contract. He declined to call them concessions.
“I have to admit, we had some pretty archaic rules where which you’d have hundreds of people coming in on Sundays when there was no work and they’d just sit around,” he said.
“At that time, we had GM over a barrel because we had great products (SUVs) that were hot, but that’s not the case anymore,” he said.
Sheridan said he met last week in Washington D.C. with GM CEO Rick Wagoner and GM Vice President Ken Cole. He called the meetings positive and said it was Cole who told him that GM wants to give Janesville a product to produce.
“I think we could offer a model contract for other locals,” Sheridan said. “But with a product, that won’t happen. They won’t be able to use us as leverage.”
In addition to Cullen and Sheridan, other speakers at the gathering included Ken Hess with Illinois-based NKF Consulting, state Sen. Judy Robson, D-Beloit and Commerce Secretary Dick Leinenkugel.
Hess worked on the package presented to GM and said Wagoner described it as “the best he’d ever seen.”
But Hess said that did not mean that GM would keep the Janesville plant operating, or that GM would be able to avoid bankruptcy.
Hess also told the group Wisconsin needs to do a better job of marketing itself if it wants to attract new businesses to the state. And he said the $150,000 budget for Forward Wisconsin was miserly compared to what other states budget to sell themselves.
Robson said she fully backs the plans to keep GM in Janesville, but lamented its current weakness and the overall condition of the economy.
Regardless of what happens to GM, she said Janesville will make it through the recession and emerge as an attractive place to do business.
Robson told the business leaders she does not believe the state can “tax cut and deregulate its way out of this downturn.” She also said the state needs to invest in education, renewable energy, universal health care, regional transportation intitiatives and broadband.
But she lamented that the downturn in the economy may make it difficult to achieve those goals, even though Democrats now control the Legislature and the governor’s office.
“It’s like we finally got the keys to the bus and there’s no gas,” she said after her speech.
Leinenkugel, who has been on the job for two months, said he will need the support of Competitive Wisconsin to help turn the state’s economy around and fix its current $5.4 billion budget deficit.
But he said Commerce will be hard hit by projected cuts of 12.5 percent next year.
Still, he said he is excited about his new job and promised to reorganize and streamline the agency’s business development efforts.
