Manteno voters delivered new blow to Gotion’s battery plant project linked to CCP – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Manteno, Illinois voters on April 1 elected staunch Gotion opponents to the offices of village president, city clerk and at least one of three village board positions that were up for election. Gotion is the highly controversial Chinese company with extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party, building an electric vehicle battery plant in Manteno. Gotion’s Manteno plant and a similar one that had been planned for Michigan have garnered national and international headlines and became a national campaign issue last fall. The Illinois project is subsidized with $536 million from the State of Illinois.

Gotion opponents are optimistic they will win two further village board seats when the mail-in ballot count is completed by April 22, though the regular vote has them slightly behind. That would give control of half of the village boards seats, with tie votes then to be broken by newly elected Village President Annette LaMore, another Gotion opponent. “It’s very reasonable to expect” that the mail-in ballots will deliver the two additional seats to Gotion opponents, LaMore told me on Monday.

Regardless of the outcome of those two remaining seats, Gotion opponents are steadfast and confident about killing the project. LaMore and Amanda Piker, founder of a local Gotion opposition group, told me they are pursuing all means possible to stop the project, including litigation that is ongoing.  Additional help is expected through Congress, where the pending No Gotion Act would prohibit federal tax subsidies from accruing to Gotion. As it stands now, Gotion’s Manteno project is eligible for $7.5 billion in tax credits under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

The similarly sized project that had been planned near Big Rapids Michigan is on hold and appears to be foundering, thanks to intense opposition. There, voters in 2023 recalled the entire township board that had initially backed the factory. Last week, Gotion announced it was “pausing” any work on the project pending resolution of litigation to stop it.

The Manteno factory, however, has begun operation using components imported from China, Piker told me. Initially, both the Michigan and Manteno projects were pitched as part of a Midwest electric vehicle ecosystem with parts made in Michigan to be used for assembly in Manteno, and final battery product supplying Midwest EV makers. However, Gotion subsequently certified the Manteno project as an international trade zone, allowing it to avoid tariffs on imported components used to assemble final products that are exported. Where the final products made in Manteno are being sent is unknown.

Gov. JB Pritzker, who championed the Manteno project, has expressly refused to answer any questions about Gotion’s connections to the CCP, reports of its use of slave labor in China, environmental risks and other criticisms, saying they are political charges by “xenophobes and “MAGA Republicans.”

That’s not so. In Michigan, where Gotion became a major campaign issue, Democrat Elise Slotkin, formerly with the CIA, won her  November race for the U.S. Senate partly by joining the Gotion opposition. Democrat Leon Panetta, who served in the Obama Administration as Secretary of Defense and CIA director warned in sworn testimony before Congress that Gotion will be used for industrial espionage. And last year the U.S. House unanimously passed a bill to bar the Department of Homeland Security from procuring electric vehicle batteries made by certain Chinese companies, including Gotion, which is named expressly in the bill.

The biggest ally of all for Gotion opponents is probably the most powerful: Mr. Market. EV battery plants are being cancelled left and right. Even the Washington Post had to admit in its headline today that “A stunning number of electric vehicle, battery factories are being canceled.” Consumers just aren’t buying EVs.

Wirepoints collects major articles about the Illinois Gotion scandal here.

We have followed and opposed it from the start, and view it as among the most irresponsible and foolish economic development projects in history. Salute to its opponents in Manteno.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

This column was updated to add the paragraph about lagging consumer demand for EVs.