Lordstown’s future

GM owes the public a Plan B

General Motors CEO Mary Barra says she does not want to string the Youngstown area along.

She does not want to give anyone “false hope” about GM returning to the area to fire up its idled Lordstown assembly plant.

General Motors closed the doors on the 53-year-old plant in March after discontinuing the Chevy Cruze that had been built there. The sprawling plant — the economic engine of the Mahoning Valley — had once been the bustling workplace of more than 10,000 workers.

But GM gradually cut shifts at Lordstown until, in March, it sent the last 1,600 workers home.

Ms. Barra does not want to offer false hope to those workers or the elected leaders pressuring her. But Ms. Barra can offer real hope.

And GM owes that much to the taxpayers who bailed out the company in the worst days after the 2008 financial collapse. It owes that much to the Lordstown workforce that built a world-class facility that now sits shuttered and dark.

Last November, GM announced it did not have a new model to assign to Lordstown. Instead, it would focus on trucks, some of which it plans to build in Mexico.

In May, GM announced it planned to sell Lordstown to a new company to be formed by Cincinnati electric-truck maker Workhorse. The company simultaneously announced it would invest $700 million in other Ohio plants, including one in Toledo, adding 450 jobs.

That news was greeted cautiously, as it should be, as a small reason for optimism.

But Ohio’s senators, Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Sherrod Brown, recently pushed Ms. Barra for more.

If GM can commit to manufacturing in Ohio — as Ms. Barra likes to point out it is doing — then why can’t the company target some of that $700 million investment in Lordstown?

And Mr. Brown pushed Ms. Barra for a “Plan B.” If GM is interested in developing electric vehicles, why can’t those be built in Lordstown?

The senators are part of a bipartisan team that has gamely persisted in pushing GM for months to do right by Lordstown. They are asking questions, posing alternatives, and reminding Ms. Barra and other GM officials that there is a better answer than leaving Lordstown to sit idle. They should keep it up. There are better answers than replacing a full-scale GM-model assembly operation with an uncertain, much smaller successor company.

The bottom line is that GM can do better.

Hope for a revived Lordstown is not a pipe dream. It should be a viable option that can help both GM and the Lordstown area thrive once again.