**Update** If you'd like to see a really good discussion about the Dell situation then head over to Cone's blog and check out the comments.  No shouting and lots of thought behind the comments.  Really good stuff. 

A couple of years back Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, blogged about a very negative experience he had with Dell and he dubbed it Dell Hell.  After yesterday's news that Dell is closing down their desktop plant here in Winston-Salem I'd say we're having our own version of Dell Hell.

Yesterday I wrote that Dell's move couldn't possibly have been a surprise to anyone who's been awake the last 18 months.  Ed Cone quoted me on his blog and since at least one of his commenters suggested that it is a surprise to a lot of people I felt compelled to explain myself in the comments:

The reason I wrote that it shouldn't be a surprise was really an observation that given the overall economic environment of the last 18 months, the fact that the plant was built to produce desktops, that the market has been moving strongly towards laptops and Dell didn't seem to be interested in re-tooling the plant to produce laptops and that Dell has been reducing it's workforce at the plant, then it shouldn't really be seen as very surprising that this has happened. Abrupt? Sure, but these things tend to be.

As for Winston-Salem getting back its incentive money I heard an interview on WXII this morning in which the Dell rep said that the incentives were based on job creation and the Dell had met those conditions, so maybe Dell is planning on fighting the return of those incentive dollars.

In addition to my points in that comment I'd also like to put forward the following thoughts:

• I remain convinced that subsidies stink. I also remain convinced that if subsidies are a part of the economic development competition between states then state and local officials are pretty much forced to use them. 
• Hopefully Mayor Joines is right when he says "The city, the county and the community will get reimbursed every dollar we put into the project." What worries me is that Dell might go to court to fight the reimbursements. Even if Dell is wrong they probably have less to lose in taking the issue to court and working for a settlement than they do in ponying up the reimbursements without a fight.
• Even if we get our money back we still have over 900 people being added to the unemployment rolls by January. That's a heck of a hit for an already overburdened unemployment system, not to mention a potentially chatastrophic impact on the employees.
• Some leaders have pointed out that the silver lining here is that we have a relatively new manufacturing facility that can now be marketed to another company. I guess that's a good long term view, but short term I wouldn't hold my breath. From the Fed's September 9 Beige Book report for the fifth district, which includes North Carolina:

  "Vacancy rates climbed higher across office, industrial, and retail space in most District markets, while the amount of available office sublease space remained fairly steady since our last report. On the sales side, very little activity was reported in recent weeks."

  Maybe we can re-purpose it as a fabulous new indoor soccer park.

• I've read some comments on other blogs and news stories that essentially say, "Hindsight is 20/20" or "It's easy to criticize the deal now, but no one could have known this was going to happen at the time the deal was struck." Those folks are right, and at this point I don't think it's appropriate to criticize the folks who put the deal together. I truly believe they were doing what they thought was best for the community and given that incentives are a tool that most state and local governments are using to attract business it's hard to criticize them for trying to compete. (We could argue that the price tag was too high, but that horse is out of the barn).  What we should be focusing on is how we protect ourselves in the future. Winston-Salem is in the unfortunate position of having two deals (the downtown baseball stadium and Dell) go squirrelly on them in very short order and I think it's clear that we have to go into these deals with eyes wide open and assume that the worst can happen.
• Any which way you slice it, this situation stinks.