A new Electric Vehicle production facility to be built in North Carolina under the direction of current Democratic Governor Roy Cooper inspired by a Democratic President Biden with dreams of reshaping America is now in progress. The most over-stepping governor in the history of the state of North Carolina has made a deal that’s impacting the lives of a number of North Carolina citizens and will impact all state citizens in some way in terms of money spent for this Economic Development package extraordinaire. Because of this business deal, 27 homes, five businesses and a church are to be removed by “eminent domain” with citizens to be forcefully evicted from their properties. In all respects, it is a land grab, and those involved will be pushed out of their habitations, pushed off their land, in the name of a falsely constructed “legality.”
Press releases say that this is the largest Economic Development Project in the history of the state of North Carolina based on the total number of dollars to be gifted to the incoming business. This is an unprecedented amount of money. That business is a Vietnamese-owned VinFast Corporation (like VIN numbers!) which announced April1st of this year that it will be building a large ELECTRIC VEHICLE manufacturing plant to be located southeast of the state capital of Raleigh, not far from UNC Chapel Hill. The plant will be located at Jordan Lake in Triangle Innovation Point. It will require be a huge plant eventually employing as many as 7,500 workers.
Triangle Innovation Point is a dream envisioned for new businesses and research facilities by the state of North Carolina in partnership with private business. The 2,150 acres appears to be a second Research Triangle Park to match the well-known park on the other side of the state capitol between Raleigh and Durham, home to Duke University.
While hundreds of textile plants in the Gaston, Lincoln, Rutherford County areas, for example, are closed down with jobs moved to Southeast Asia because of lax tariff restrictions as they were dropped in the United States, this plant is being built near Raleigh. Many such textile plants especially in the counties bordering these in South Carolina also closed. Tariffs used to be high in the 50s and 60s to protect American workers’ jobs in factories, the people who make less money than most people. Factories were a difficult place to work but they did have a job. They’ve largely lost those jobs to Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Mexico over the past 20 years and the largest factory in North Carolina was razed, which was close to Concord. This happened nearly overnight and it was replaced with a high end research type facility, a University- based complex. This left multiple thousands of those factory workers jobless at the same time while plants like Philip Morris, north of Charlotte ,and others in the state were shuttered, too, due to legal battles. That’s a huge loss of jobs in North Carolina for the common workers.–and also a loss in those South Carolina counties employing such workers, too.
With the leadership of Governor Cooper, President Biden, and Democratic “pushers,” the state will expand high-paying and create jobs happily for University students in the area where many reside, seemingly giving them another “leg-up” in the work force. Recently, in the city of Charlotte, roughly $130 million was spent to extend the Light Rail to the University area where there’s also a small Research Park, too. The rail goes from downtown out a 9.3 mile stretch of new track through business properties. 11 new passenger stations and 3,100 parking spaces were added so that people can be transported to and from the University.
When they razed the factory employing the most workers in the state, a textile towel manufacturer named Cannon Mills (2010), a Research Park was conveniently built to replace it between Charlotte and Raleigh on the oldest state Interstate, I-85. It is University-based. This also is north of UNC Charlotte. So factories are shut down and Research Business Parks are built in areas convenient to colleges. While Democrats like Obama, Clinton and Biden tout new, more highly skilled and better paying jobs for workers in America, where do the plain workers from textile mills and tobacco companies get employment—at McDonald’s where they must compete with high school-age workers? It appears in this case that in North Carolina, they plan to build ELECTRIC Sport Utility Vehicles for college graduates and liberal lawmakers to drive while also giving them higher-paying jobs.
The Chatham Journal newspaper reported that only 3% of North Carolinians now own electric vehicles, and only 12.8% of the citizens of North Carolina think they may buy one down the road. The idea of electric vehicles at this particular time is popular but are they practical? The amount of money being poured into this project is incredible, and it shows how far Governor Cooper and his Democratic backers are willing to go. What they are going to be given in financial support of the project includes a transformative class job development investment grant. State tax incentives will extend beyond the program standard 12-year time horizon up to 30 years. So this Vietnamese VINFAST grant could provide the company $316.1 million paid over 32 years if it makes its performance targets over those years. North Carolina community colleges will provide $38 million in customized training support. The Gold Leaf Foundation is providing funds. That’s tobacco—and seemingly has nothing to do with Electric cars. That’s $50 million.
The County will provide over $400 million in incentives from its treasury, bringing the total close to a BILLION DOLLARS. Pending approval by the Board of Commissioners, the North Carolina General Assembly says the state is expected to appropriate $450 MILLION MORE in support of the project, increasing the overall total to $1.5 BILLION to be used for site and road improvements and additional water and sewer infrastructure, for tax incentives, for specialized training, and more. This is a huge economic event for the state; for that area and for the citizens who are being asked to leave their homes.
Journalists at the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper state that resident Lena Stein has lived in her home for nearly five decades. She said that it’s appalling to her that she’s going to be now put out in the cold. The Sanfords are another group who has lived on their land for 70 years. The Raleigh News and Observer reported Jack Sanford saying, “They are taking everything we’ve got.”
There are times when land has been seized for projects such as the building of the Lake Norman Dam—Cowans Ford Dam. There were homes at that time and a variety of places that ended up underwater once flooded. However, a number of questions arise here.
Does the law of eminent domain allow homes, businesses, churches and land to be taken—even if purchased though against owners’ wishes– for general business use? This is non-governmental, private business, not a plant that is going to be owned by the state of North Carolina. It is also not a dam created for a utility. There are special laws for utilities and dams, but none for private businesses to take land within the state.
In this case, does the law of eminent domain allow properties to be taken for a foreign-owned company? It is a Vietnamese company, not an American. Near a proposed new development at the Catawba River, there is land owned by a Japanese company named Sumitomo that dates all the way back to the 1600s and began with Buddhist monks. Where do these foreign interests fit into our American “business scheme” and do we move our citizens for them, even for a large new factory?
Do the people affected have a voice at all? The project was announced last April1st. The general public is just hearing about plans which have been firmly concluded before we’ve heard any of the voices from the property owners. It’s already four months down the road since the project was officially announced with all the financial figures determined—the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed.
Should the state of North Carolina be conducting this project? And should they be planning it when it is actually in a different county than the state capitol, Wake County. This is Chatham County, with townships involved. Yes, there is a nuclear power plant in that area, conveniently, but there are county boundaries as well as personal property boundaries–people with homes and investments and 70-year property ownership.
Regarding the Electric SUV’s to be built, why build large Sport Utility Vehicles if you’re going to get into the electric vehicle business? Sport utility vehicles obviously require more electricity to run than small compact cars, which are more feasible at the present time and state of our electric grid. They’re also more economical for our society to be using smaller vehicles.
If our people make a major move to electric cars, which the Biden administration has basically said will eventually be required, charging stations will need to be built. While there are some around, most currently are for government vehicles at this point with only a few randomly located here and there.
Obviously, we are going to need new nuclear power plants to service Electric Vehicles in great number. Is that not a given for anyone that has logical sense? Just because you change from gasoline to electricity does not mean that you’re not going to burn energy. A basic law of physics states that energy is neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form. If you have to drive a car down the road–to produce enough energy to get there at a certain speed it takes the same amount of energy no matter in what form. The faster you go, the more you must produce. The more weight you move, the more energy required. But it still requires energy in the same amount to produce the same work, no matter which form it takes.
The largest plant built in North Carolina is the McGuire Nuclear Power plant near Charlotte. There are three in North Carolina and also four in South Carolina, while only 30 of 50 states now have a nuclear plant. The McGuire plant near Charlotte, north of Charlotte generates over 17.5 Gwatts GWH—supplying 44% of the entire state’s nuclear-generated power. The largest nuclear power plants in South Carolina are the Oconee with three generators, followed closely in production by the Catawba Nuclear station near Charlotte. McGuire was built in the early 1980’s while Oconee were built in the 1970’s.
One University of California, Berkeley researcher recently estimated the USA will need a 100% increase in nuclear power plant production to handle the 2050 electric cargo of majority electric vehicles in America. With only a little more than half of our states even having one, certainly more will be needed for them. Also, western state are facing a dwindling water supply as recently farmers were given strict planting restrictions due to water limitations. Water is a major requirement for cooling of nuclear reactors to keeping them from melting down–another consideration. It is estimated that to build a plant like McGuire in today’s dollars would cost roughly $5.88 billion. If the US will need 120 plants (double our current number), that would amount to 60 new nuclear plants at roughly $6 billion per plant or around $360 BILLION. So a question is: has Governor Roy Cooper and the General Assembly of North Carolina planned for the added cost of the nuclear power plant–at least one more that will need to added?
The issue of Electric Vehicles is becoming a reality but it’s not nearly so simple as it appears. There are certainly more questions for our liberal, Democratically-led, “pie in the sky” government leaders that one could imagine. As Governor Cooper first broke a standing Monuments Protection Law in North Carolina by removing state Confederate monuments himself (the domain of the State Historic Commission), it seems that issues of foreign-owned businesses and eminent domain for building cars and research parks to aid universities without plans for how to power such vehicles may not be surprising. This is a highly complex issue and leaves one wondering whether the supposed “Party of the Common Man”–the Democrats—has completely forgotten the Blue-Collar, Common man and woman entirely.
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