Tidy Packages    Among the incentives highlights for the two Korean projects:    Kia in West Point, Ga.    • The City of West Point and Troup County will provide $130 million in property tax abatements over 15 years.    • If Kia meets the contractual minimum of 2,500 jobs created, it will receive $65.6 million in job tax credits against its tax liability over five years. The credits jump to $75.9 million if 2,893 jobs are created.    • The State of Georgia will purchase the site from 37 land owners for approximately $35.7 million, then invest $24.8 million in site preparation.    • The Georgia Dept. of Transportation will construct a new Interstate interchange and access road at a cost of $30 million, with much of that funding coming from federal sources. A rail spur from the CSX line running through the property will be run to the site at a cost of $6.05 million.    • The state will build a $20.2 million, 70,000-sq.-ft. (6,503-sq.-m.) training center on the site, invest $5.5 million in maintenance and operations of the center over the first five years, and invest $5.7 million in training curriculum development and implementation through the state's well-regarded Quick Start program of the Dept. of Adult and Technical Education.    Samsung in Austin, Texas    • The Manor school district will contribute $115 million in property tax incentives over 10 years.    • The City of Austin will contribute $62.9 million and Travis County $44.7 million, both over 20 years.    • The project will see a cash grant of $10.8 million from the deal-closing Texas Enterprise Fund.

   Dialing back from legal issues to simple management style, Schuetz says some Korean automotive firms are still on their first generation of North American management, and are experiencing the same types of difficulties that Japanese firms did before making the leap to more balance between expats and natives in their North American management ranks. In the process, an insular culture often transforms into a more open one.
   Now negotiating style and terms shift to a bigger canvas, where insularity by either nation may prove costly. Some wonder if negotiating style may actually be something the parties hold in common. After all, just as some U.S. dealmakers are sometimes flummoxed by a lack of agreement detail and endlessly open-ended negotiations with their Asian counterparts, so too do Canadian officials decry attempted renegotiation by the U.S. with regard to softwood lumber tariffs in the face of WTO rulings.
   "Negotiation is an ongoing thing," says John Schuetz of the Korean style. "Laws are recommendations and contracts are suggestions. If it isn't going the way you like, you renegotiate. The general consensus is it's a different culture – not right or wrong, it's just different."
   Maybe it's not that different. In any case, U.S. dollars and Korean won are different too, but both speak loudly.
   "We expect the amount of two-way trade between our two countries, now valued at $73 billion, to only continue to grow under an FTA," said Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler in a March 7 speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Seoul. "In a recent study, the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy estimates that two-way trade will increase by almost $20 billion as a result of this agreement. This represents a tremendous opportunity for U.S. businesses and workers."
   The citizens of Troup County, Ga., and Austin, Texas, heartily concur.

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