GM Wants $200M to Build Small Car in Tennessee

GM is asking for around $200 million from the state of Tennessee to build a small car at the Spring Hill factory, Governor Phil Bredesen revealed after a meeting with a group of officials representing the US automaker. The sad thing though is that Tennessee doesn't have the cash to support such a project, Bredesen said according to tennessean.com.

"This is for them all about front-end money," Bredesen was quoted as saying by the source. "They don't care about tax credits and those other kinds of things. It certainly was a new look for me at how they're approaching this thing, which is absolutely, 'Tell me how big of a check you're going to write.'"

Bredesen revealed that he privately met with three GM officials, including GM North American President Troy Clarke, the company's director of manufacturing operations and the head of government relations. Additionally, Fritz Henderson, GM Chief Executive Officer, unveiled that the company is closely analyzing 12 criteria of all three production facilities in the game but refused to provide more details on the matter.

General Motors last week announced that the battle for its US small car has been narrowed down to three plants, Spring Hill, Orion Township, Mich., and Janesville, Wis.

"Frankly, the numbers that they were talking about are well outside of what I think we can do with the budget situation that we have. This is not a year in which I've got a spare couple of hundred million dollars from the rainy day fund to use for something like this, so we're going to have to do some serious thinking about how we respond to their request," Bredesen added.