A Kentucky town may be gaining $600 million of stimulus money. But what will it lose?

GLENDALE, Ky.-Three hundred people live here now. Soon, thanks to the stimulus, six times that number may work in the town. Even though the residents hope and say otherwise, the daily life of Glendale would never be the same. Being here is like existing inside a newsreel before it becomes a charming flashback. We know what we gain when the stimulus creates jobs. But what is it that we lose?

A few months ago, Glendale was chosen as the site for a new electric-car-battery plant that would specialize in hybrids and plug-in vehicles. Six-hundred million dollars of stimulus money could arrive in this town within weeks, turning it into a 2,000-person worksite in six months. And soon after that, a factory on the edge of town would employ 1,800 people permanently. The site would be a national clearinghouse that would only manufacture the batteries-the research and development would be left to everybody else. Glendale would become a locus for the electric-car/hybrid industry.

To be clear, it's not Glendale that's getting the stimulus money. The money would actually go to an alliance of battery producers called NAATBatt, which is made up of many of the big guns of the battery industry. Glendale is just NAATBatt's home. The consortium has put in a request for $600 million of the Department of Energy's $2 billion electric-car-battery budget, noting how handy it would be to have a national manufacturing facility in the United States in advance of the coming car-battery war with Asia.

Glendale, then, is either a town on the cusp or on the brink, depending on your half-empty/half-full ideology. My photographer, Dave, and I came to town to see Glendale before NAATBatt and the vast expanse where it is supposed to be built. (Looking at empty fields is a Recessionary Road tradition.) A few years ago, it was almost a Hyundai manufacturing plant, but the deal got scuttled, depriving Glendale of the kind of jobs the new battery plant may bring in. The local government has owned the land since, and all that sits on it now are slowly decaying billboards. "Wendy's, Exit 94," reads one, pointing, of course, to an exit that does not lead to Glendale. The field sits next to I-65, and the cars whir by at 70 miles per hour and 20 miles per gallon. Yellow butterflies are the main residents, mirroring the sun as they glide low to the ground.

The field is three miles from downtown, a commercial district that is three square blocks if you're being generous, one if you're a realist. There are as many churches as there are restaurants (three), and the town's main tourism draws are its once-a-year "Crossing Festival" and a smattering of antique stores. The hub of its downtown is the Whistle Stop Restaurant, which seats more than half the town (170 people) and serves perhaps the most flavorful mashed potatoes I've ever had. Residents sit on their porches reading the paper on Sunday afternoons. The place manages to be genuinely quaint while fulfilling its small-town stereotype.