Auto czar visits Valley Park
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
07/18/2009
By Tim Logan
VALLEY PARK -- They came from Washington on Friday, to see what life is like without Chrysler.
Ed Montgomery, the White House's point man for battered auto towns, and representatives from a half-dozen federal agencies came to Valley Park to meet with local officials and union reps. They asked what, if anything, they can do to help fill the hole that Chrysler and its suppliers left behind.
They've been making the rounds lately to places like Dayton, Ohio, and Romulus, Mich., where the brunt of the collapse of the auto industry has been felt the sharpest. Fenton's turn came Friday, two weeks after the Chrysler plant there finished its last Dodge Ram.
Sitting at the front of a middle school auditorium, Montgomery acknowledged there are no easy answers. His team has no "magic bullet" to bring back the thousands of lost jobs, or to create new ones amid the weakest economy in decades.
What his team can do, Montgomery said, is "work across silos" and "cut red tape," and get the federal bureaucracy headed in the same direction to help Fenton find its place in a new economy.
"Our job is to figure out ways we can help," he said.
Montgomery did bring one bit of good news, word of $25 million in stimulus money to help retrain auto workers in hard-hit communities. It comes on top of $50 million announced earlier this month, and a host of other programs to help factory workers transition into new careers.
But in the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, only part of which was open to the media, he heard about a lot of other needs from the local officials sitting alongside him.
Fenton Mayor Dennis Hancock told Montgomery of the huge importance of finding a new use for the 300-acre complex Chrysler left empty alongside Interstate 44. It's state-of-the-art, he noted, but it won't be if it sits vacant too long.
Linda Martinez, Missouri's top economic development official, said St. Louis' auto industry has been about as hard hit as anywhere. Seven in every 10 car-making jobs here have disappeared since 2000, she noted. Giving up on those workers, Martinez said, is "simply not an option," and she urged federal officials to help attract new, "green" industry to St. Louis.
And this kind of job loss has happened here before, said Denny Coleman, head of the St. Louis County Economic Council. When McDonnell Douglas slashed 27,000 local jobs in the early '90s, it took a big and coordinated effort, with lots of federal help, for the region to rebound.
"This can be done," he said, but it takes a lot of work.
A half-hour into the conversation, when Coleman was done, Joe Shields and Don Ackermann stepped out for a smoke.
They head the United Auto Workers locals at the two Fenton plants, and they had sat down for a lengthy meeting with Montgomery and Sen. Claire McCaskill before the meeting started. They appreciated the visit, they said, but it might have been more helpful before their plants closed.
They're not too happy that Chrysler still makes Rams in Mexico and vans in Canada but nothing in Fenton despite billions in U.S. government aid. And they said they wish the company would have listened years ago, when the UAW pushed for small, fuel-efficient cars.
Neither Shields nor Ackerman had much faith in the retraining programs everyone's talking about. They'll just pile more workers into already crowded industries, Shields said, and most of the people he represents aren't kids anymore.
"What are they going to train me for?" Shields asked. "I'm going to be 51 next week."
Then the two men headed back inside to hear the rest of the conversation about life without Chrysler.
