VinFast is Building A $4B Auto Plant In Moncure, NC

Fred said:
They're never going to build the plant, either.
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Maybe Vin fast is what the county needed to justify creating a Megasite on that side of the county. The county now has justification to use imminent domain to seize the lands they want and start the infrastructure development knowing that Vin fast will be defunct before the plant is ever built.

All the other megasites in Chatham and surrounding counties were developed on open land. That side of the county doesn't have near as much open land and the price per acre in that area is much more than in the rest of the county. Vin fast seems like fall guy for this adventure in politics.
 
Fred said:
They're never going to build the plant, either.
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I thought so at first, but now that the inflation bill tax credits require the vehicles be assembled in the US, there is going to be more EV plants opening here.
 
Me. said:
I am not bright or visionary in business. For sure. But if I had to invest money in Vinfast, or bet that you two are right….I’d put my money on you.
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I strongly suspect that @Fred has a good head about these things. Or at least he’s closely as cynical as me so I tend to agree with his point of view. Sadly cynicism these days tends to be right at some point. If you assume a gov’t body is corrupt and doing shady things you are usually correct.
 
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Fred said:
They're never going to build the plant, either.
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Considering the cost of capital just 2x’ed in recent months, the US economy is heading full speed into a recession, and the global economy is also at high risk, I agree.
 
Scsmith42 said:
We're both right (LOL).

The bulk of TIP is south of Old US1. However there are a few hundred areas of it that is between Old and New US1's. The part N of Old 1 is the old Honeywell plant.

Here is a map of the entire facility. I've added a few landmarks. Woody's range is right in the middle of it.


View attachment 456999
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chathamjournal.com

NC Government takes family’s Chatham County land so foreign company can move in - Chatham Journal Newspaper

Raleigh, NC - Two Chatham County communities will soon be without twenty-seven homes, five businesses, and one church because the state of North Carolina is exercising its eminent domain powers to make way for VinFast, a startup Vietnamese auto company.
chathamjournal.com chathamjournal.com

Raleigh, NC – Two Chatham County communities will soon be without twenty-seven homes, five businesses, and one church because the state of North Carolina is exercising its eminent domain powers to make way for VinFast, a startup Vietnamese auto company.

Eminent domain is a legal tool that allows the government to take privately owned land by force in the event a property owner refuses to sell it voluntarily.

In March of 2022, after the Department of Commerce actively recruited VinFast, Gov. Roy Cooper announced the state was awarding the young company nearly $1.25 billion in state and local taxpayer incentives over the next three decades (you read that right!) in an effort to incentivize their manufacture of a new fleet of electric vehicles (EVs).

The state government has promised VinFast thirty years of access to taxpayer money and land, making a bet on this startup’s scalability and profitability, even though the company’s U.S. market is still in its earliest infancy.

The state’s egregious land grab on behalf of a private company has left residents out in the cold
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What if someone seeded the land with mercury, PCBs, or other hazmat materials, wait for the structures to be up, then send an anonymous note causing the area to be dug out?
 
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Get Off My Lawn said:
What if someone seeded the land with mercury, PCBs, or other hazmat materials, wait for the structures to be up, then send an anonymous note causing the area to be dug out?
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The state would give them more money to remediate the issue.

Now if there was endangered species found on the land, that would stop it and all other activity on the land forever. Its a no win situation. If the .gov can't have the land, then no one will have it.
 
The worst thing about the land grab is the fact that the housing market is not something that you want to be forced into when you can't even get market value for your house.
 
It is my understanding that the land being taken by eminent domain is all for the purpose of building access highways to TIP and the FedEx facility.
 
Scsmith42 said:
It is my understanding that the land being taken by eminent domain is all for the purpose of building access highways to TIP and the FedEx facility.
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Even if the roads being built are nominally public property, if they exist for the sole private benefit of TIP/FedEx that seems like a distinction without a difference.
 
shackleford said:
Even if the roads being built are nominally public property, if they exist for the sole private benefit of TIP/FedEx that seems like a distinction without a difference.
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The entire site is a county / state project similar to RTP. They have been working on it for years, pre-doing all of the county, state and federal approvals for an industrial site.

I personally have lost land due to eminent domain, and did not like the experience. My only point in posting the clarifications in this thread is so folks can form their opinions based upon facts, rather than conjecture.
 
Fair enough, I'm all in favor of knowing the facts. So I tried to find some, although granted I didn't spend hours researching this.

As best I can tell, "TIP" is a privately owned entity which sold the land to VinFast. The TIP properties are also "certified" by something called the "Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina", that also appears to be a private company with an unknown relationship to the state. The NC state legislature passed an incentive package for VinFast (the largest in state history) including money earmarked for road improvements, and ultimately it was NCDOT who made the decision of what and where to build, which leads us back to the eminent domain issue. Which itself is only one aspect of the greater problem of government corruption, where politicians vote for public money to be spent on enabling private profits. Eminent domain is a symptom of the disease in this case.
 
When it comes to eminent domain, in my personal experience, the only way to deal with the state is with the biggest stick you can find. The first offer will not be a fair offer.
 
fieldgrade said:
When it comes to eminent domain, in my personal experience, the only way to deal with the state is with the biggest stick you can find. The first offer will not be a fair offer.
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Many years ago, I had a coworker who was faced with having a cell phone tower put up in his development. It would have gone in a common area that was a small piece of land behind the backyard of several of the home owners. The phone company really did not want to put the tower there as it was a suboptimal location. They really wanted to put it in an industrial area, but one of the local bureaucrats objected to that location because he would have to drive by it daily on his way to work and he didn't want to look at it either. I told him the message I would send to that bureaucrat and he loudly exclaimed something about not going to resort to mafia type tactics.
 
RedneckFur said:
We could solve a lot of problems if we passed a law that only people who's grandfather's were born in NC could own property here. I figure 3 generations is enough for someone to adopt the right mindset.
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So what you’re saying is that you’re pro-inbreeding??? LOL
 
fieldgrade said:
When it comes to eminent domain, in my personal experience, the only way to deal with the state is with the biggest stick you can find. The first offer will not be a fair offer.
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You don’t need a big stick, you just need to dig your heels in and refuse all offers ( like you said) until they are forced to get a market-based appraisal.
 
Get Off My Lawn said:
Yup. I've got plates 250 yards off the back porch, if someone sends one high, it'll go into their proposed building.
It's going in directly across from The Bradford. Chatham Co had hearings & surveys saying they were installing a large park between west of this plant and US-1. Someone just built a high end horse facility and barn right there as well.
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Sounds like you need to build a bigger backstop.
 
shackleford said:
Using eminent domain powers to transfer property between private parties is grossly immoral and unethical. But also a very effective way for people in government to enrich themselves and their cronies at our expense.
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That’s not how eminent domain works.
 
Joe. said:
That’s not how eminent domain works.
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Then why does trump, "love eminent domain"? So he can take small folks property to put a hotel where he wants. Walmart does the same. The local govts play along for the additional taxes.
 
Get Off My Lawn said:
Then why does trump, "love eminent domain"? So he can take small folks property to put a hotel where he wants. Walmart does the same. The local govts play along for the additional taxes.
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I can’t explain anything that guy says or does, but eminent domain is the power of the government to take a person's private property and convert it into *public* use.
 
Joe. said:
I can’t explain anything that guy says or does, but eminent domain is the power of the government to take a person's private property and convert it into *public* use.
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That's what it's supposed to be used for, like when Hw-40 was built across the nation for national security. It had considerably higher bridges for the specific purpose to transport ICBM parts from one coast to the other.
Govt bureaucracies love to cross the liberty lines.
 
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Joe. said:
You don’t need a big stick, you just need to dig your heels in and refuse all offers ( like you said) until they are forced to get a market-based appraisal.
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You have no clue what kind of investment and commitment it takes.

We beat the state in court in front of a jury.
 
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shackleford said:
It’s a Supreme Court ruling. Got a permit to move those goalposts?
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A very controversial one, at that, which caused many states to strengthen protections for property rights. The ruling's interpretation found that "public purpose" equated to "public use", which I feel is a slippery slope. That said, taking private land in support of a wide-ranging economic development/redevelopment plan is one thing (although can definitely be a stretch in certain instances), but taking private land for the direct benefit of another sole private entity is another.
 
JohnFreeman said:
Can't fill the open jobs here today. We don't need more.
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"No more jobs! We don't want economic growth and stability! Let the regional economy stagnate and die when a recession hits!" :rolleyes:
 
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Chuckman said:
Well, you're getting jobs:

wraltechwire.com

Wolfspeed picks Chatham County for new semiconductor plant, 1800 jobs | WRAL TechWire

WRAL has learned Wolfspeed will be expanding its chip manufacturing into Chatham County. It’s a project that could bring 1,800 jobs with an investment of billions of dollars, according to the state budget.
wraltechwire.com wraltechwire.com
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Once this is announced, I bet within a few weeks to a few months VinFast will no longer be coming to Chatham. Local news in Chatham has reported that VinFast hasn't filed for any permits yet. VinFast would be the perfect scapegoat for preventing the locals for blaming Wolfspeed for all the problems while also making Wolfspeed seem to be a savior for filling the jobs role that VinFast isn't going too.
 
Wolfspeed huh? Another company I have never heard of. Then I read that they were formerly known as Cree, who was at the forefront of the LED lighting revolution but then became known of really poor quality and pretty much crashed and burned. Apparently a name change is supposed to solve that, or at least cause enough dis-joint that the non thinkers don't notice.

Why is the area getting products that people aren't likely to buy and companies that aren't likely to make it big? I have no interest in electric vehicles because of a lot of the cost and other issues associated with them, including pushing the pollution up stream and the dirty mining required for the batteries. I have even less interest in them from a manufacturer I have never heard of based in a 2nd or 3rd world country.
 
I suspect that this won't be a success. Start up auto companies don't have a good track record in the U.S . I read that a buyer has to lease the vehicle batteries for $100 or more a month. I don't think that will fly with American consumers.
 
Me. said:
What's the Wolfspeed/NYS connection?
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NY promised them a crap ton of money to build a facility there. Was gonna cost taxpayers about $500k per job created. I don't know if they ever broke ground on it. But NY made a big deal out of it.
But nobody with brains and experience wants to take any job requiring moving to NY.
 
cold1 said:
Once this is announced, I bet within a few weeks to a few months VinFast will no longer be coming to Chatham. Local news in Chatham has reported that VinFast hasn't filed for any permits yet. VinFast would be the perfect scapegoat for preventing the locals for blaming Wolfspeed for all the problems while also making Wolfspeed seem to be a savior for filling the jobs role that VinFast isn't going too.
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They just closed on the land. Typically land disturbance and other civil permits are not too far behind.
 
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