Freight Rail Helps Georgia City Land Billion-Dollar Kia Plant

GA-Westpoint

The plant will employ between 2,500 and 3,000 people, with another 7,000 to 10,000 employed by parts suppliers and 20,000 expected to be employed by ancillary businesses.

Plant will ultimately produce 300k vehicles annually and employ thousands

West Point, Georgia was once a large textile-manufacturing town located next to a busy freight rail line.  In the 1990s, those textile factories, one by one, began to close and ship production overseas.  When the new millennium arrived, West Point was a depressed city of rising unemployment and empty, rundown factory buildings.

Then in 2006, ground was broken for a new billion-dollar car manufacturing plant to be built by Korean carmaker Kia.  When the deal was announced, access to freight rail lines was mentioned as one of the main selling points because Kia plans to eventually ship 80 percent of cars by rail.

Kia says the plant should eventually produce 300,000 vehicles annually and employ between 2,500 and 3,000 people.  Another 7,000 to 10,000 people are expected to be employed by parts suppliers and another 20,000 are expected to be eventually employed by ancillary businesses.

The first new car rolled off the production line in November 2009, but the impact of the factory has already begun to be felt.  Local officials estimate that Kia will inject as much as $6.5 billion into the local economy by 2012. The state of Georgia has spent more than $30 million on road improvements into the facility and a significant amount was spent to build rail spurs into the factory.  Kia’s charitable arm has made sizable contributions to local causes — like $10,000 to help construct a new women’s center at the West Georgia Medical Center and donations to the Fuller Center Project, which builds and renovates homes for people living in poverty.

The local job market is already feeling the effects of the new facility and the local investments it has brought.  Property values are up; unemployment is down.  Construction of new housing units has picked up, there is a new motel in town, and there is gradual improvement in the rundown, historic center of town, which now features several new restaurants.

For a city with a population of approximately 3,300, the progress is momentous — and it would not have happened without the existence of multiple freight rail lines in West Point.