by Jon Styf
OPMobility will receive a $558,000 incentive grant from Tennessee toward a $3 million expansion of its Spring Hill plant, which is expected to lead to 186 new jobs in Maury County.
The France-based company was renamed OPMobility from Plastic Omnium in March. It will then have 568 employees in Tennessee and more than 200 in Spring Hill after expanding from its 18 current employees in Maury County.
OPMobility will expand its product offerings and “further support electric vehicle production lines” with the expansion, it says.
The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced the project in late June without revealing the incentive amount.
Economists question whether economic incentives such as the TNECD FastTrack grants are necessary to recruit new businesses or have businesses expand in the state.
FastTrack grants are state grants sent to companies to help offset the costs of expanding or moving into the state with the goal of increasing the number of full-time jobs and the average wages of jobs available in an area.
Tennessee recently approved nearly $1 million FastTrack Job Training Grants for Wal-Mart Associates e-commerce fulfillment center in Lebanon and Hyla Mobile in Mount Juliet.
Tennessee also pledged $218,750 to Synergy Magnetics for its planned $5.6 million startup in Jackson County that will employ 35 people in Gainesboro. The company manufactures transformers.
TNECD now has a balance of more than $139 million in uncommitted funds for FastTrack incentives. The state reported $13.2 million in newly available funds toward that balance from companies that will no longer be receiving the promised grant totals, often due to not fulfilling the promised investment or new job requirements.
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Jon Styf is a staff reporter at The Center Square.
Crony capitalism at its finest in Tennessee. How many hundreds of millions, well actually billions, of tax dollars have been doled out to companies in the Volunteer State. One dollar is too much.