In a courtroom in Kankakee County, Illinois, residents with the group Concerned Citizens of Manteno are trying to force a Chinese battery plant out of their community.
Barred by Illinois law from recalling the officials who approved the deal, they have taken the one route left—a lawsuit, now in its third year, alleging that the Gotion factory on the edge of their village is a fire and chemical hazard prohibited by the town’s code.
Local officials negotiated an agreement that would cap Gotion’s taxes at $2 million per year for 30 years, regardless of how much the plant produces. Only about 7 percent of that money would go to a local fire department now tasked with protecting the town in the event of a lithium battery fire.
The residents of this small Illinois community are not the only ones who are wary. Gotion is the U.S. arm of a battery maker whose Chinese parent’s corporate documents describe a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee and Party branches. It has met with strong resistance elsewhere in the United States as well.
Michigan declared Gotion in default on a separate project and is trying to claw back roughly $24 million. Congress has barred the Pentagon from buying the company’s batteries beginning in October 2027. A new federal tax law moved to strip it of the credits most American battery plants depend on.
The state of Illinois is the exception—it welcomed the plant as the largest electric vehicle battery investment in state history and has paid Gotion $165 million in cash.
(Left) Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (Center R) and Gotion representatives announce plans for a lithium battery plant in Manteno, Ill., in Sept. 8, 2023. (Right) The headquarters of Gotion Inc., in Fremont, Calif., on Aug. 26, 2026. (Courtesy of Gov. J.B. Pritzker's office, Dylan Morgan/The Epoch Times)
Local Price
That welcome has a local price the town is still tallying. On top of receiving the $165 million from the state, Gotion will benefit from a fixed tax rate allowing it to pay only about double what the previous tenant—an empty Kmart distribution center—did, and for decades into the future.
Most of that money will go to the village’s schools, because that is how Illinois splits property taxes.
The fire district’s share, for providing fire protection to a lithium battery plant covering 1.6 million square feet, comes to about $140,000 more per year.
Mike Barry, a village trustee who lives a quarter mile from the plant, has run the arithmetic many times, and it does not come out in the town’s favor, he said.
The debate in the town of Manteno has also raised a larger question for residents, trustees, and outside experts: what it means for a company whose Chinese parent’s corporate documents describe a CCP committee and Party branches to embed itself in an American town with the help of public money.
Some residents and outside experts argue that the plant could leave the United States more reliant on Chinese-made batteries.
‘Project Unity’
The deal that brought it was negotiated under a nondisclosure agreement that kept the company’s name from the public for more than a year, according to records reviewed by The Epoch Times. Manteno’s residents found out about the Gotion deal as it was being signed.
The hunt for a site ran through the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and a private site consultant, under a nondisclosure agreement that the county’s economic development group signed on to in September 2022—more than a year before the deal was announced.
An official from that group—the Economic Alliance of Kankakee County—later testified that the agreement never named the company. Even the group’s own slide presentation laying out the tax break, which residents obtained through records requests, never says “Gotion.” Instead, the document is titled “Project Unity.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced the deal at a September 2023 “powering up” event in Manteno.
By then, Amanda Piker, a Manteno nurse, had already started filing records requests after asking about Gotion on the village’s Facebook page and getting no clear answer.
The records Piker obtained show that the village spent public money on a Chicago public relations firm, Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications. The firm was brought in as the rezoning moved through town hall in late 2023—after the project was public and residents had begun to organize against it.
Piker characterized the arrangement as something worse: “One of the biggest eye-openers was our [Freedom of Information Act] request where we figured out that they were paying a PR firm to do opposition research on us,” she said—"us” being residents who had been asking questions about Gotion at village meetings and online.
In the days between the planning commission’s recommendations and the village board’s final vote, the public relations firm helped draft answers to residents’ questions, emails show. It also proposed website language. The payment for its work came in chunks of about $20,000—each payment too small to force its own line-item vote, Piker said.
Local resident Amanda Piker in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. By the time Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced the Gotion battery plant deal, Piker had already started filing records requests after asking about Gotion on the local Facebook page and getting no clear answer. (Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
What Michigan Did
Robby Dube, attorney for Concerned Citizens of Manteno, in this file photo. (Courtesy of Robby Dube)
Gotion’s first planned U.S. factory was in Green Charter Township, Michigan. Residents there stopped it before the company could break ground—not in court, but at the ballot box.
Green Charter Township residents recalled their entire township board. Voters similarly recalled the supervisor of a neighboring township over his support for the project. And newly elected Mecosta County commissioners—who had run on their opposition to Gotion—then withdrew support for the planned factory.
In response, Gotion sued the township in March 2024 and won a preliminary injunction that cleared its way. Despite this, it never broke ground.
“All they had to do was actually apply for the permit, start breaking ground on this plant that they supposedly said they wanted, and they did nothing,” said Robby Dube, attorney for Concerned Citizens of Manteno.
The Michigan episode informs what Dube described as his leading theory about Gotion’s plans in Illinois, though he said he could not prove it. Dube said a company such as this might be chasing one of two things: government money—“if the project falls apart, oh well”—or, if it can “thread the needle” into operation, a place among the suppliers rushing to feed the data center battery boom.
Michigan has sued Gotion seeking to recover its money, citing unmet milestones. Illinois has not.
“They really need Illinois to work,” said Jillian Rojas, a board member of the Manteno residents’ group, “because they no longer have the Michigan option.”
(Top) Manteno residents opposed to a Gotion battery plant demonstrate outside the Kankakee County Courthouse in Kankakee, Ill., on Jan. 14, 2025. (Bottom Left) A sign states “Welcome Gotion Inc” in Green Charter Township, Mich., in this file photo. Residents successfully stopped the Chinese battery maker from building a plant in the rural community. (Bottom Right) An overhead sign signifies downtown Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. (Courtesy of Amanda Piker, Courtesy of Jim Chapman, Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
No Way to Recall
Manteno’s residents cannot do what Michigan’s did, but most don’t learn that until they go looking.
The Illinois Constitution lets voters recall exactly one official—the governor—with a power that voters added to the state constitution in 2010. It says nothing about mayors, village trustees, or county board members. Towns can write their own recall rules, and almost none have.
The lack of a general recall option leaves Manteno cornered, said Lori Brock, whose Michigan farm sits across from the abandoned Gotion site there. Brock led the recall campaign that drove Gotion out of Green Charter Township and has advised the Manteno group for two years.
“For one, they can’t recall anybody,” she said. “There’s laws against it in their state, so they have no real way to fight this.”
There’s another obvious difference. Gotion never broke ground in Michigan, but in Manteno, it moved into an existing building. So when the fight began, the company was already inside.
Concerned Citizens of Manteno board member Jillian Rojas in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. “They really need Illinois to work, because they no longer have the Michigan option,” Rojas said about battery maker Gotion Inc. (Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
Fire Safety
Michael Pecht, professor and electronics expert, in this file photo. (Courtesy of Michael Pecht)
What cornered the residents also frightened them. The plant, they feared, could one day bring a lithium battery fire. That kind of fire, once it takes hold, can be difficult to extinguish, said Michael Pecht, a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland who directs its Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering. Pecht is regularly called on to investigate why batteries catch fire.
Slowing or stopping the spread of a lithium battery fire requires a tremendous amount of water. Plus, a lithium battery makes its own oxygen and keeps burning, he told The Epoch Times. A fire that looks dead can flare back up days or even weeks later. Against a large-scale blaze, he said, “the fire department can’t do anything” but cordon off the area, make sure that there’s nobody inside, and just let it burn.
According to the village’s files, Gotion received its occupancy permit on Aug. 22, 2024, after the company signed a letter promising to fix seven fire safety items that were still unfinished—including ventilation units locked out, an emergency voice evacuation system not yet installed, and leaking valves.
One item to fix was the outdoor fitting where firefighters connect their hoses to feed the sprinklers; someone had written beside it that it would not open. That repair was due eight days later. The permit was issued that same day, while all seven items remained outstanding.
The next morning, the fire chief wrote that his sign-off was “not a final comprehensive list, nor [was] it an approval for the final occupancy permit.”
Streetlamp banners honor hometown heroes in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. (Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
The lawsuit itself came down to one question: Does the plant use the kind of highly toxic chemicals Manteno’s code forbids?
While the residents were in court arguing that it would, a village official wrote an official finding into the occupancy permit, stating that the plant uses no such chemicals. The available record does not show that the residents were notified, even though the finding addressed the central issue in their lawsuit.
The village then relied on that finding in seeking dismissal, arguing that the residents’ group had never formally challenged it. The judge declined to dismiss the case.
In a decision on May 14, 2025, Judge Lindsay Parkhurst wrote that a town cannot bury a decision and then blame people for not fighting it. The defendants “cannot use administrative remedies as both a sword and a shield,” she said.
Because a battery fire is not an ordinary fire, Manteno’s agreement requires Gotion to field a brigade of 18 firefighters and keep six of them on the floor at all times.
The company disputed the staffing requirement. For most of a year, records show, it pushed back—and at one point proposed paying for outside coverage instead.
The headquarters of Gotion Inc., in Fremont, Calif., on Aug. 26, 2026. The company is a subsidiary of Chinese battery maker Gotion High-Tech. (Dylan Morgan/The Epoch Times)
In June, an executive spelled out the offer to the fire chief: Gotion would pay “up to $1 million per year” for outside coverage—“$15 million over 15 years”—if the district allowed it to cover the plant with three responders per shift rather than six.
The chief said no. The fire district could not agree to an arrangement that would gradually shift “operational risk, emergency response burden, and associated liability” back to local and possibly regional fire resources.
The question stopped being hypothetical on a June afternoon when a battery pack caught fire on a production line. According to the fire district’s report, the response was effective.
The plant was being evacuated when the first officer arrived, and Gotion’s brigade—in full gear and air masks—had already knocked the fire down, dropped the damaged pack into a tank of water, and hauled it outside. No one was hurt. The brigade worked.
The fire also showed what the town had taken on. Even with the flames out, the danger was not over: A lithium battery can reignite hours after it looks dead, so the ruined pack had to be watched overnight. That job fell to the plant’s own experts. The company’s safety manager told the responding officer that Chinese engineers at the plant would monitor the battery overnight.
After a year of pushing back, the company came to terms. On Aug. 7, 2026, the village reached an agreement with Gotion—which the village board adopted unanimously—that required the company to keep six certified firefighters on site at all times and to have 18 trained to the state’s level one basic operations standard by Aug. 31, with the village able to pull the plant’s occupancy permit if the staffing were to fall short.
“Now we have control over the safety of our residents,” Barry said. “And to be clear, we didn’t have that until [Aug. 7].”
A sign warns visitors at the gate of the Gotion battery plant in Manteno, Ill., in summer 2025. The plant was declared a foreign trade zone, allowing Gotion to manufacture lithium battery packs and systems with reduced customs costs and operational flexibility. (Courtesy of Julie Holda)
Assembly and Dependence on China
Battery cells arrive at Gotion’s Manteno plant finished. Gotion put that in writing in September 2024, when its representative, Russell “Cole” Sayre, told the village that “Phase 1 is only assembly” and that “the batteries are already manufactured, tested and sealed prior to reaching our facility.”
That distinction, Pecht said, is critical. He said the cell—the sealed unit that stores the power—is the hard thing to make, the work of “gigantic companies” with clean rooms and enormous scale. In his account, a pack is a bundle of those finished cells wired into a frame; the cells come from China, and workers in Manteno set them in and put the covers on.
Asked whether that lessens American dependence on Chinese batteries, Pecht said it does the reverse.
“It means more dependence on China’s supply,” he said. “It’s the reverse of what one thinks.” Assembly, he said, is “the very low end.”
That raises the question the neighbors keep asking: Why perform low-end battery assembly in Illinois against this much opposition?
One possible explanation is the availability of state incentives. Pecht also suggested that trade may be a factor: Assembling on U.S. soil would sidestep the steep tariffs Washington has placed on finished Chinese batteries.
(Top Left) Activists Jillian Rojas, Amanda Piker, and a fellow community member hold signs during a protest walk in Manteno, Ill., on Oct. 22, 2023. (Top Right) Activist Ann Gates protests outside the battery plant location in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 8, 2023—the day Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced the project. (Bottom Left) Darrel Bruck, founder of a Kankakee County group that opposes the Gotion battery plant, holds a sign at a protest and news conference outside Manteno Village Hall in Manteno, Ill., on Oct. 2, 2023. (Bottom Right) Manteno residents hold signs voicing opposition to the Gotion battery plant, in this file photo. (Courtesy of Amanda Piker, Courtesy of Concerned Citizens of Manteno)
Pecht said that assembling inside the United States could let a Chinese company maintain access to the U.S. market even as the country tries to build a battery industry that does not depend on China.
Gotion’s public plans for the Manteno site were incremental. At the 2023 hearing, its senior production manager laid out three phases for the plan commission: first storage containers, then packs built from cells “already made, already tested” in China, and finally an actual cell factory.
The state promoted the plant on the promise of the third phase—the battery cell factory. The building has been operating the first phase—assembly—and has not reached the cell factory described in the third phase.
(L–R) Concerned Citizens of Manteno members Amanda Piker, Robert Forsythe, Jillian Rojas, Julie Holda, and Fran Ludwig, in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. (Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
State grant records show that the equipment those grants paid for, itemized in Gotion’s own spending reports to the state, went to module, pack, and energy storage assembly lines—not cell-making machinery. The state’s approved plan for the site called for it to “produce 10 [gigawatt-hour] Pack + 20 [gigawatt-hour] Cells by the end of 2025,” a deadline that has now passed.
Asked directly whether its agreement requires Gotion to manufacture cells in Illinois rather than assemble imported ones, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity did not say it did.
“Assembly is part of manufacturing,” an official told The Epoch Times, noting that such a project “can be assembly-only if that is in the approved application.”
Documented Party Ties
The corporate documents at issue describe how Gotion’s Chinese parent is structured. Its corporate charter set up a CCP committee inside the company, called for the board chairman to serve “in principle” as the Party secretary, and let CCP members move onto the board and into senior management.
Such Party committees are common in large Chinese companies; Beijing encourages them. The documents reviewed here describe that structure at Gotion’s parent company. Separately, Gotion’s Manteno project is receiving American public money to build on American soil.
The parent company’s 2022 corporate responsibility report, reviewed by The Epoch Times, counts 923 CCP members and 11 Party branches across its operations, and describes Party-building work throughout.
Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Work & Welfare Subcommittee, asks a question during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 1, 2026. In November 2023, LaHood cosponsored a bill—dubbed the NO GOTION Act—to block U.S. green energy tax credits from going to companies linked to adversarial nations. (Mariam Zuhaib/AP Photo)
Washington’s Answer
Washington’s answer to Gotion came in the form of law—twice.
Two years ago, Congress specifically named Gotion, among others. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024—the annual law that sets Pentagon policy—bars the military from buying batteries made by six Chinese manufacturers, including Gotion, starting in 2027.
In November 2023, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) joined a Michigan colleague on a bill aimed squarely at the company: the No Official Giveaways Of Taxpayers’ Income to Oppressive Nations Act, or NO GOTION Act, meant to keep federal money away from firms such as the battery manufacturer.
The stand-alone bill never got a vote. But its core idea was folded into the sweeping tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which imposed new prohibited-foreign-entity restrictions that could disqualify companies with specified Chinese ties from federal credits.
(Top) Members of the Illinois Freedom Caucus and other supporters of Concerned Citizens of Manteno at a press conference outside city hall in Manteno, Ill., on Oct. 2, 2023. (Bottom) Members of Concerned Citizens of Manteno meet author and China analyst Gordon Chang (4th R) at a fundraiser for the group in Olympia Fields, Ill., on Oct. 28, 2025. (Courtesy of Amanda Piker)
Who Gets the Bill?
Despite efforts against Gotion at a federal level, the state of Illinois continued disbursing public funds to the battery maker.
In September 2023—months before the village board voted to approve the plant—the state named Gotion the first recipient of a new fund, Invest in Illinois, and committed $125 million. Comptroller records show that it was paid out in two payments on Dec. 8, 2023—just a few days after the village board approved the Gotion deal—and Jan. 2, 2024.
Two more grants followed: $12.5 million in September 2024 and $27.5 million on Dec. 30, 2025—about six weeks after the fire district had put it in writing that the company’s safety commitments were still unmet. In January, a Gotion official told the village board that the matters were resolved.
Asked whether the company is keeping its promises, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which administered the grants, told The Epoch Times that “Gotion is in compliance with [its] reporting.”
The agency said it held no records certifying that Gotion had hit the targets the money is tied to. The deal promised 2,600 jobs. As of a November 2025 update to the village board, Gotion said it employed about 300 people, with 450 projected by the end of the year.
Kristan Wong Karinen of Good Jobs First, a Washington group that tracks such subsidies, said that arrangement is backward: The protection for taxpayers is to pay only “after the terms of the agreement are met.”
A water tower in Manteno, Ill., on Sept. 3, 2026. A battery plant operated by Gotion Inc. occupies a former Kmart warehouse in Manteno. (Nathaniel Smith for The Epoch Times)
The agreement also involved more than tax revenue. Because the plant sits in an enterprise zone, Barry said, the village “waived all [of Gotion’s] permit fees and inspection fees and everything else.”
Fiscally, “it’s not going to work,” he said of what the deal does for Manteno.
The plant is not without its defenders. The building trades unions signed on early and testified for the project, and the plant’s jobs are required to pay above the county’s average wage. The village’s schools, which take the biggest share of the plant’s taxes, collect more than they did when the building sat empty.
A win for the residents would also be narrower than it sounds. It would bar the battery operation, Dube said, but not empty the building or cost the town its tax base—another tenant could simply take the space.
Even if they win, the order in which the project’s steps happened would remain part of the record. The approvals came first, followed by the plant; additional safety checks and firefighter staffing measures were addressed afterward.
Barry, the trustee who started with the arithmetic, is blunt about who is left holding it.
“We’re the ones that are sitting here trying to pick up the pieces of decisions that were made by our ex-administration and our governor,” he said.
Gotion and its attorneys, the village of Manteno, and B&F Construction Code Services, the firm that handles the village’s plan reviews, did not respond to requests for comment.
