WEST POINT -- Kia Motors USA halted West Point’s economic slide when it opened up shop in the southwest Georgia town, propping up a region teetering under the impact of dwindling jobs.
Yet, even as the Korean automaker announced that it will add another 1,000 jobs to the local payroll, residents said the town is lucky to be holding its own, given the disappearance of other jobs and other companies crippled by the global recession.
“A lot of the impact would have been different if the economy hadn’t tanked,” West Point pizzeria owner Frank Norman said Friday, taking a break from cooking lunch-time calzones and pizzas. “We’re still on the ground floor.”
Kia broke ground on its West Point auto plant in 2006, with the promise of thousands of new jobs and economic revitalization for a Troup County region hammered by the loss of a once-thriving textile industry.
But even though the company boosted construction activity, hired more than 1,900 workers, and spawned an estimated 4,000 multiplier-effect jobs among auto-supply companies, a full-scale renaissance has been slow to take hold. Officials mark the Troup County unemployment level at around 12 percent, and barely a dozen home have been built in a new, high-end subdivision platted for 180 just outside of town.
“We didn’t fall off the cliff,” West Point Mayor Drew Ferguson IV said. “We were driving up to it real fast. Kia just gave us a bridge.”
“Development hasn’t happened because people can’t sell their homes to move here,” said Gus Darden, who co-owns a shoe store in downtown West Point. “Until they can, people working here likely won’t live in town.”
When textiles were a viable economic driver, West Point had a population of more than 9,000. But those jobs dried up, and by the late 1990s, the town had dwindled to barely 3,500.
“Before Kia, it was a tough environment,” Ferguson said. “We had been in economic decline for two decades.”
The assembly line began rolling just over a year ago. The plant makes two SUVs, the Kia Sorento and the Hyundai Santa Fe. Kia officials say most of the people they hired were from Troup County, including West Point and the much larger town of LaGrange.
The auto maker and its suppliers have pumped up the municipal tax base by 17 percent. Columbus State University has opened a satellite campus downtown.
Business is certainly better in West Point than it would have been without Kia, but absent an influx of new residents, there has been no rush of entrepreneurs to follow in the footsteps of Frank Norman and his wife, Donna, who opened a Johnny’s New York Style Pizza franchise this summer in downtown West Point.
“People write letters to the editor here asking, ‘When’s the growth coming?'" Donna Norman said. "They’ve got to support what we’ve got first, before more people will be willing to do what we did.”
Transforming a town or a region is a complex, long-term process; transforming an individual life can happen in an instant.
Eddie Mabe learned he was losing his job with telecommunications manufacturer Emerson Network Power just after Christmas. The company was moving the work to Mexico, and, as the human resources manager, Mabe was tasked with transitioning the staff of nearly 300 -- himself, included -- to unemployment.
Then a Korean auto supply company, Hanil E Hwa, moved into the building deserted by Mabe's old employer and picked him to help assemble a workforce, which now includes several of his former colleagues.
"Who knows if Kia wasn't here what would've happened," Mabe said Friday. "I may still be unemployed."
When the textile company Westpoint Stevens (formerly Westpoint Pepperell) closed its five plants in the 1990s, LaGrange, West Point’s neighbor to the north, learned a painful but valuable lesson about the danger of relying on a single industry.
“From then on, our goal was not to have all our eggs in one basket,” said Jane Frye, executive director of the LaGrange Development Authority, who which helped Ferguson’s father broker the deal to get Kia.
The town, with a population of 28,000, courted and landed a bevy of industrial employers, from Kimberly-Clark to the regional printing operations for The Wall Street Journal.
“We have no empty buildings,” Frye said.
West Point hasn’t been so lucky. One of the former Stevens plants sits mostly unused just a mile outside the downtown area, across the state line in Lanett, Ala.
Kia's expansion plans will certainly help, especially since Ferguson estimates that each job the auto maker adds will be accompanied by another two jobs in associated industries.
But the mayor said that too many residents simply don't fit the profile employers such as Kia are seeking. According to the 2000 census, 27 percent of Troup County adults lacked a high school diploma.
“There are still segments of the community that need job training," Ferguson said. "They need to have at least a high school diploma or GED to work at Kia.”
When Latasha Culberson drives past a Kia Sorento, her 6-year-old daughter Gabrielle takes note.
"That’s the car my mommy makes,' " Culberson said, quoting her daughter. “She’s so excited that I work there.”
Before Kia came, Culberson, who grew up in Troup County, was driving a an hour each way to a job in Atlanta. Her husband, a truck driver, was watching his hours dwindle to nothing.
Today, they both work for Kia. The company even allows them to work the same shifts.
“Now I’m closer to home, so I can spend more time with my daughter, and we have guaranteed pay checks paychecks every two weeks,” Culberson said. “Thank God for Kia.”
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