Electric Car Maker Folds, City Loses $500,000

Aren't you glad that government is investing in "Green" technology, rather than promoting that nasty old oil that private industry is willing to drill for, pump, refine, pay taxes on, and increase the supply of gasoline to lower its cost? Yeah. Me, too!

A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line.

The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company. All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan.

The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009, after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city of Salinas handed Ryan an additional $240,000. Green Vehicles also received $187,000 from the California Energy Commission.

Funny! I drove through Salinas a couple times today, never knowing they were snookered into investing with a Green Weenie. I was out in the fields with all those nasty gas powered tractors and harvesters and pumps and all the good things petroleum products provide to make American farms prosperous and productive. I even put 388 miles on my own POV just getting there and back.

If only we had a president who encouraged oil production in this country as much as he does in Brazil, or Columbia or China...

The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas.

Hope! Change!!

Including the California money, the company... burned through over $700,000 of taxpayer money.

Anyone want to bet that some of that $700,000 was spent on carbon spewing private jets and limos to impress the marks, er, investors, that this was a good deal?

Yeah. Me, neither!


H/T Newsbusters

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.