BlueOvalSK Battery Park concept design
When Ford Motor Co. needed a big chunk of land to build electric vehicle batteries near its truck plant in Louisville, Ky., the Commonwealth of Kentucky quickly rose to the occasion.
Ford and its battery supplier SK Innovation will spend $5.8 billion to construct an EV battery complex on a 1,500-acre site near Glendale, Ky., a gentle landscape of low rolling hills and not much else.
But look back nearly 20 years and you'll see that handing over an industrial megasite isn't always simple.
In 2002, Kentucky officials were one whisker away from landing a Hyundai vehicle assembly plant at the very same spot.
It was a big project — Hyundai's first U.S. plant at the time — and company officials were liking what they saw in those 1,500 acres.
Just short of 1,500 acres, actually. A Kentucky family didn't want to sell their 111-acre farm, which sat in the future plant site, no matter how hard the governor pushed and pressured.
It got testy.
State officials threatened eminent domain to get the farm, a parcel that had been appraised for between $800,000 and $900,000. The owner said if Kentucky really needed it, the price would be $10 million.
The state balked.
The owner even emailed Hyundai in Korea to declare that he had no interest in selling. And the ongoing fight could delay their auto plant project by years.
Hyundai walked away from Glendale and went with an equally attractive piece of land in Montgomery, Ala., where it makes vehicles today.
Eventually, for future prospects, the state swallowed hard and paid the farm family approximately $6 million for their land. But Hyundai had already moved on.
Nearly two decades later, the mammoth scale of Ford's project in tiny Glendale dwarfs the oversized price tag for 111 of its acres. But if Kentucky hadn't balked in 2002, Ford wouldn't be investing there today.
Send us a letter
Have an opinion about this story? Click here to submit a Letter to the Editor, and we may publish it in print.
