GM to talk to states about plant incentives

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - General Motors Co will talk to state and local governments to see what incentives might be available before deciding which shuttered U.S. plant it will reopen, North American president Mark Reuss said on Saturday.

Reuss said last month that the No.1 U.S. automaker was looking at reopening shuttered assembly lines at Spring Hill, Tennessee or Janesville, Wisconsin, to resolve a short supply of hot-selling vehicles.

On Saturday, he told reporters attending the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in Orlando, Florida that the company is "still looking at which (plants) and how to do it.

"And that would be a conversation that would not be just internal to GM but also to some of the states where those plants are," he said.

The Janesville and Spring Hill assembly lines are considered likely candidates to reopen because while they were closed last year as part of GM's bankruptcy, they do not belong to the so-called "Old GM" that remains in bankruptcy.

The "New GM" emerged from a U.S. government-financed bankruptcy in July.

GM is in short supply of some of its best-selling vehicles, including the Chevrolet Equinox, Buick LaCrosse, Cadillac SRX as well as full-size pickup trucks and sports utility vehicles like the Chevy Tahoe.

The automaker has about 390,000 vehicles in U.S. dealer lots, short of its targeted inventory in the range of 400,000 and 450,000. vehicles, U.S. sales chief Susan Docherty said.

Reuss said if a shuttered U.S. plant is reopen, it would operate in a more flexible, and innovative way.

"What we want to do is something that may not be traditional in terms of how we do it and how we staff it and how we bring it on and off," he said.

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall and Soyoung Kim, editing by Philip Barbara)