The Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber will give its Spirit of the Valley Award to General Motors at its annual meeting Wednesday — a decision upsetting a number of those who lost their jobs or relocated when the company closed its Lordstown plant.
The timing of the award is bad — a little more than two years to the day, March 6, 2019 — that the last Chevrolet Cruze rolled off the production line at the assembly plant.
The closure was a devastating blow to the region with about 1,500 jobs lost that day. The plant had employed about three times that amount about five years earlier.