QUESTIONS FOR FORD SESSION

State Rep. Robin Smith, R-Hixson, posted on Facebook Sunday that she was asked while in Nashville last week if she planned to vote for the state’s record incentive package for Ford Motor Co. during this week’s special session of the General Assembly.

If she had said an immediate “yes,” we would have — and her constituents should have — been disappointed since the legislation detailing the incentive package hadn’t yet been filed.

Besides, Smith said, she and her constituents had some questions they wanted answers to before she could think about voting for the legislation.

Ford and South Korea battery maker SK Innovation are planning to make a $5.6 billion investment in Tennessee and manufacture electric-powered pickup trucks and employ more than 5,700 workers.

Until the legislation was filed late Friday, the state was known to have offered the companies incentives of some $500 million. As it turns out, the state wants to spend nearly $900 million for not only the incentives but also for infrastructure work and a new technical college at the site.

As Chattanooga area residents well know with the state’s, county’s and city’s investment in Volkswagen, an automaker — and its attendant industries — can pay off handsomely.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t, or shouldn’t be, questions asked before such an expense is approved.

Smith had three specific ones that she asked in a letter to Gov. Bill Lee, who called the special session so the incentives package could be debated, and we think they’re pertinent ones, though certainly not the only ones.

Her questions were these:

1) What is the contractual relationship with UAW [United Auto Workers] and Ford that is often referenced in news and analysis as the automaker with the largest number of union employees and that the new facility “would be a union plant?”

2) What clawback provisions exist in the incentives protecting Tennesseans’ investment to ensure the proven and established economic and workforce policies that define the success of this state continue? What are the enforcement details of these clawbacks?

3) Recognizing that the recruitment of Ford Motor Company began in February 2021, according to news reports, what disclosures and/or conditions were offered relative to Tennessee economic and workforce laws and policies?

Though UAW officials have boasted the Ford facility would be a union plant, Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley told The Associated Press it will be up to the employees to decide on unionization. And Lee, noting Tennessee is a right-to-work state (meaning workers can’t be forced to be in a union), said workers will “have the option as to their work environment.”

Of Tennessee’s other auto plants, Volkswagen in Chattanooga and Nissan in Smyrna are non-union shops, and General Motors in Spring Hill is a union facility.

The Ford facility will be in Haywood County, one of the bluest counties in the state and one of only three to prefer Democrats over Republicans in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. So getting employees to endorse a union there is likely to be easier than it was for the two previous “no” votes on a union at Volkswagen.

But Smith is right to ask the questions about what, if anything, has been promised about unions when Ford selected the state for a manufacturing plant.

She’s also right to mention clawback provisions that could be put in place if Ford doesn’t follow through with any promises it makes about investment, hiring or policies involving plant employees.

Former Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, who was a state senator when the state legislature approved incentives for Volkswagen in 2009, put the situation into perspective when the VW plant was expanding in 2014.

“This time around,” he said, “we’re not going to do a lot of the open-ended commitments we made the first time. Some of those sound great until you try to figure out what that costs down the line to actually accomplish.”

Volkswagen initially received the equivalent of $557 million in tax breaks, training assistance and infrastructure investments from the state. With its 2014 expansion, that amount grew to nearly $900 million. But the expansion package required VW to give back 300 of the 1,200 acres of free land it got six years earlier and required the automaker to pay an annual $250,000 economic development fee. It also was requested to make regular reports on minority, women-owned and military veteran business participation and hiring.

The company’s 2016 diesel cheating scandal also gave heartburn to lawmakers, who’d approved two rounds of incentives for a company they been told was one of the most environmentally friendly automakers in the world.

The state has come a long way from the Nissan and GM plants then-Gov. Lamar Alexander lured to the state in the 1980s.

“All we did for [them] was to build a road and paid to train the workers,” the then-U.S. Sen. Alexander said at VW’s selection of Chattanooga in 2008.

Ford has the potential to be a wonderful asset to the state and its employees, and state incentives may pay for themselves as the electric vehicle market grows. But we hope Smith and her fellow lawmakers won’t hesitate to demand answers to all the questions they have in mind before dispensing a dime of the taxpayers’ money.