Despite being a foreign vehicle manufacturing company, Nissan Motor Co. has contributed to local American economies in a positive way for many years — at least more so than certain domestic car manufacturers recently — and the Nissan North American expansion into Smyrna, TN, is just another example of that trend.
According to the Daily News Journal, Gov. Bill Haslam announced on Tuesday, March 17 that Nissan is currently investing $160 million into building a new plant in the small Tennessee town, creating about 1,000 jobs in the process.
The project is reportedly set to begin later in 2015, and the plant is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2017.
According to The Tennessean, this move is just another example of “automakers seeking to shorten the time and distance that parts have to travel to reach their assembly lines.”
In addition to benefiting from lower manufacturing costs, Nissan will receive $35 million in state incentives, along with $18 million in tax incentives that will be paid out over a 20-year period.
Regardless of whether or not Nissan is merely following a “trend” to reduce production costs or benefit from incentives, it can’t be ignored that the company has made substantial investments in the United States. In Tennessee alone, the automotive company is responsible for providing 8,400 jobs in Rutherford County (where Smyrna is located), and 12,000 jobs across the state.
And although the car manufacturing industry is responsible for providing one out of every 20 private sector jobs in Tennessee, plenty of other states have benefited from Nissan’s commitment to small-town communities.
As for the residents in and around Smyrna, the exact reason why Nissan chose to invest in their small town isn’t the most important detail; the fact that 1,000 new jobs will be created, and that the estimated annual wages for these workers be about $10,000 more than the average annual wages in the region, are reasons enough to celebrate.
“As a lifelong resident of Smyrna,” Mayor Esther Reed stated, “I’ve seen us grow from 7,500 residents to more than 43,000, and a large part of that is due to Nissan.”