Georgia is featured again in The New York Times, this time good: One Town’s Rare Ray of Hope: New Auto Plant

West Point mayor Drew Ferguson IV stands in the middle of downtown West Point, Ga., where the new KIA auto plant is scheduled to open later this year.

From The New York Times:

While much of the rest of the country remains mired in the depressing gray of recession, this rural town [West Point] of fewer than 3,500 people on the Georgia-Alabama border, about 80 miles southwest of Atlanta, has somehow managed to draw the winning ticket in the nation’s economic lottery.

A new Kia Motors Corporation automobile manufacturing plant is opening here this year, an event that many residents of this former mill town, where life had slowly been ebbing away, can only describe as heaven-sent.

Foreign automakers have flocked to the South, drawn by huge incentives offered by state officials, cheaper labor costs and the nonunion environment. (In the case of Kia, which is based in South Korea, state and local officials doled out some $400 million in tax breaks and other incentives.) But this year, Kia’s is the only car factory scheduled to open in the country, drawing workers to one of the few regions now with concrete hopes of quickly escaping the economic downturn.

Kia has hired only 500 people at this point, but is working its way through more than 43,000 applications it accepted online last year. Supply companies that will feed the plant are increasing their hiring in the area, too.

Hourly jobs, which are not unionized, in contrast with those at the Ford and General Motors plants that recently closed in the Atlanta area, are still expected to pay about $15 to $27 an hour.