Recharging the Voltage Valley must be priority

General Motors’ recent announcement of massive layoffs at Ultium Cells in Lordstown hit the Mahoning Valley like a ton of bricks.

For some, it rekindled a sense of perverse deja vu, harkening back to the series of GM layoffs that began about 10 years ago and ended in 2019 with the moth-balling of the once-sprawling 13,000-employee vehicle assembly plant in the village.

That’s understandable. The announcement two weeks ago that GM will permanently lay off 440 hourly workers and temporarily release an additional 850 workers at its local Ultium Cells plant beginning Jan. 5 stands as the largest set of job losses from one company in the Mahoning Valley in several years.

But, unlike the chain reaction of job shrinkage at the Lordstown assembly plant that began a decade ago, this time around,