Mary Fallin visits Clinton

March 09, 2010

Clinton Daily News

Gerald Green

Clinton auto dealer Dusty Ballard announced Tuesday that he has been offered his General Motors franchise back.

"I received a phone call from GM," Ballard told a small group of employees and Clinton leaders gathered in the showroom of his dealer-ship. "They're going to reinstate us."
At least they're offering to. Ballard said he is be-ing sent a letter contain-ing details and he wants to read through it to make sure all the terms are acceptable.
"We are excited, though," he said, adding that he has 10 days to reply.
Ballard made the an-nouncement following a 30-minute conference with Republican guber-natorial candidate Mary Fallin, currently the congresswoman from Oklahoma's Fifth Dis-trict. She was standing at his side as he made the announcement, and he gave her part of the credit for making it hap-pen.
In an interview with the Clinton Daily News that followed, Ms. Fallin said her role was a general one.
"In Congress, we've been holding GM's feet to the fire," she said, "encour-aging them to treat our local dealerships fairly. This is good news they have received. Now the ball's in Dusty Ballard's court."
Ballard had received word last May that his dealership's GM fran-chise would not be re-newed. He vowed then to stay in business, "with or without General Mo-tors," and has done so.
Congresswoman Fallin praised him for his flex-ibility and innovation in her interview.
"I'm very proud of the work Dusty has done to restructure his business plan to keep the doors open and keep em-ployees and their fami-lies in their jobs," she said. "This is a challeng-ing time to keep busi-nesses open. I'm really excited we've received some good news for Clin-ton. I appreciate what Dusty and his family have done to keep the doors open."
Fallin said 17 Oklahoma dealers lost their GM franchises last May and this is the first one she's heard of being reins-tated. "Hopefully there will be others," she said.
The national media re-ported a few days ago that about 600 dealer-ships across the country were being reinstated. In Minnesota, where the state's Automobile Deal-ers Association said 20 owners were being of-fered the option of reins-tatement, a Minneapolis-St. Paul television station quoted one of them as saying that fac-tors in his company's se-lection included an im-pressive building, good sales quotas, and good customer service.
Not only GM but also many Chrysler franchis-es were pulled last May after those two icons of the U.S. automotive in-dustry accepted bail-out money from the federal government after posting huge losses.
Fallin said she did not think it was fair for GM to pull the local fran-chises.
"They have loans, in-vestments and payrolls to meet," she said. "Dus-ty's got a beautiful new facility built six years ago. To know that all that could be at risk. . . ."
Asked if she was blaming GM rather the Obama Administration, she smiled and said, "I don't think the politics of Washington helped. It seemed there was some heavy-handed politics going on."
She said in her opinion, the best way to do busi-ness is to let the free market system work it-self out. She obviously did not feel that had been done in this in-stance and said she did not support the fran-chises being pulled.

 

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