To his delight, the automaker put a giant training facility right next door, and rentals of his movies boomed. "I had a good run because of it," he said.
But today, more than 20 years later, the South Central Tennessee Career Center has moved in next door, where unemployed people go to look for work.
"Their business is great, but mine is not," Tom Smith said. Maury County's August unemployment rate was 12.4 percent, up from 7.9 percent a year earlier.
Already hit hard by the economic downturn, Tom Smith and other merchants in Columbia and Spring Hill, which have thrived on carmaking jobs for two decades, are bracing for more trouble as the auto industry shrinks.
GM will end assembly of the Chevrolet Traverse crossover utility vehicle at the plant in late November, moving the work to Michigan. The Spring Hill facility will then officially be on "standby," which means it could eventually get another vehicle, although nothing is certain, the automaker said. Separate talks to sell GM's Saturn brand, which got its start here, also fell apart last week.
Towns are still optimisticIn the meantime, the shutdown will put about 2,500 GM employees out of work, along with an additional 1,000 or so who work for nearby GM suppliers.
Although about 600 GM employees at the facility will continue building engines — and 110 workers will keep handling the national Saturn parts and distribution operation, at least for now — the big drop in employment will hit the community hard, said Columbia Mayor Bill Gentner.
"When I came here in 1988 as city manager, I told members of the council that they needed to be prepared for an exit strategy at some point, as GM is known for leaving towns," he said. "Little did I know that we would be talking about less than 30 years."
Sales tax revenues for both cities and Maury County are expected to decline, although probably not significantly for at least a year or two, said Spring Hill Interim City Manager James Smith.
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