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A corporate decision to avoid creating a home-field advantage as a part of Toyota’s large-scale North American restructuring meant Kentucky would not be considered as a site for the automaker’s new North American headquarters.
In late April, Toyota announced 1,550 jobs would be leaving its Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America (TEMA) offices in Erlanger, 1,000 of which would relocate to a new headquarters in Plano, Texas, while 250 would move to a facility just south of Ann Arbor, Mich., and 300 would be moved down I-75 to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky plant in Georgetown, Ky.
There was a concern that “the host could dominate the other in terms of cultures coming together,” said Mike Goss, TEMA’s vice president of external affairs and communications, about the reason offices from Kentucky and California would relocate to suburban Dallas.
“We told Governor Beshear this directly; that’s why he wasn’t invited to make a proposal, because we already decided what was going to be best for our company was the neutral location,” Goss said.
In a statement at the time of the announcement, Beshear’s office expressed disappointment about the 1,250 jobs that would leave the state and lamented not being able to pitch the company that Beshear helped attract to the commonwealth while lieutenant governor in the 1980s.
“We would have welcomed the opportunity to discuss options with Toyota, but we will now turn our attention to preparing for this transition,” the statement from his office read.
Goss said while it is possible individuals could relocate from the Georgetown campus to the new headquarters that is expected to be completed in 2017, there would be no wholesale relocations of employees or division from the Kentucky manufacturing facility.