By Greg Bump
WisBusiness.com
Gov. Jim Doyle told a conference of UAW officials at the Concourse Hotel in Madison that the American auto industry will, and must, make a comeback.
“You simply can’t have a country that doesn’t make cars,” Doyle said Monday. “We have a president who understands that. We have congressional leadership who understands that.”
With the Janesville GM assembly plant slated for closure this week, Doyle said he’s waiting for a federal task force on the future of the auto industry before declaring the ultimate fate of the plant.
“A lot of what will happen to Janesville will depend on what they do,” Doyle said.
Doyle said GM reps have told him in the last couple weeks that they continue to look at the Janesville plant as a possible manufacturing site in the future.
“But I don’t want anybody to draw any false hope from that because they always have been very clear in saying to me, ‘Look, we’re dealing in a really difficult situation right now,'” Doyle said.
Doyle, who took a trip to Spain earlier this year to study high speed rail, said there have been follow-up contacts with manufacturers there about building rail cars in Janesville or elsewhere in Wisconsin.
“I’m hopeful as we move forward with passenger rail there really is no significant passenger rail manufacturing industry in the United States, and it seems to me Wisconsin’s a good place for it,” he said.
Doyle touted the $38 million in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act received by Wisconsin for worker retraining. He said he has been working with the Obama administration since the day after the election to try to help unemployed people.
“We’re going to put these funds to good use because we know there are a lot of really good people, many of them your UAW brothers and sisters … who want to get to work and maybe need to have some new skills in order to do it,” Doyle said.
