Rural NIMBYism strikes planned electric truck manufacturing plant in Georgia

David Gelles of the New York Times reported yesterday from Rutledge, Georgia, population 781, about 50 miles east of Atlanta.  The headline is "How and Electric Truck Factory Became a Lightning Rod in Georgia."  The subhead is "The governor hailed the factory as an economic boon that would put Georgia at the vanguard of the green economy. Not everyone liked the idea."

And here's an excerpt that gets at the essential conflict about the proposed $5 billion Rivian factory, which would produce 400K emissions-free vehicles a year.  

Protests have at times grown vitriolic. At a public meeting with a local economic development group that supported the project, Edwin Snell, who lives nearby, excoriated the officials, removed his red baseball hat and kicked it at them. “It’s a rural area,” he said to loud cheers. “It’s not an industrial waste dump.”

"Industrial waste dump" sounds like hyperbole, but Snell's spin reminds me of the "property" section (specifically on the topic of "nuisance") of my 2006 law review article, Rural Rhetoric.  Here's a quote from that article, which documented how judges and legislatures tended to see rural property as distinct from an implicit urban norm:  

Courts have often distinguished between rural and urban in relation to various aspects of rights in real property. In the nuisance context, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court (incidentally using a rural metaphor) expressed a key principle in an early land use case: “A nuisance may be merely a right thing in a wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” With respect to the rural-urban differentiation, this means that courts may be more tolerant of agricultural annoyances in rural areas but less tolerant of other irritations that interfere with the perceived rural idyll. Several states have held, for example, that while a race track is not a nuisance per se, it may constitute a nuisance per accidens under certain circumstances, as in a rural area. Many courts thus more aggressively defend rural areas against nuisances, especially non-agricultural ones, suggesting that these presumptively pristine and quiet areas are especially sensitive to the loud, the smelly, and the ugly. (pp. 187-89).

In any event, the proposed plant has split Georgia's Republican candidates for governor.  David Perdue, the recently deposed Republican Senator, now challenging Kemp for the GOP nomination for governor, is quoted: 

We can grow the economy without selling out and giving our tax dollars to people like George Soros. We can invest in rural Georgia without kicking our communities to the curb.

Soros, a major Democratic donor, owns $2 billion in Rivian stock.  As Gelles points out, there are some conspiracy theories swimming around in this story.  

Perdue's opposition is especially interesting because when he was the CEO of Dollar General, he did plenty to undermine rural economies.  

Don't miss the entirety of the Gelles story, bearing in the mind that the factory is the sort of economic development we typically see rural areas fighting to get.