Tammie Middagh, secretary-treasurer of the Arapahoe Chamber of Commerce, said Chrysler and GM sales in the town have accounted for $20,000 for the street and alley fund since January 2008 — money that could be lost forever.

"This is what brought it closer to home for us," she said.

And it's hard to understand, Middagh said, how closing a dealership that didn't cost Chrysler a dime saves money, when, from what she can tell, it just forces people in her town — many of them older — to go farther to buy a car.

Still, most Americans oppose using government money to aid the car companies, said Scott Rasmussen, whose firm Rasmussen Reports has polled public views on helping the auto industry. Last Thursday and Friday, his firm polled 1,000 likely voters across the country and found that 67 percent oppose any plan that would provide GM with $50 billion and give the federal government a majority ownership stake in the company. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Most Michigan voters support U.S. aid to GM and Chrysler, he said, but 56 percent nationally would prefer that GM close rather than have the government rescue it.

Still, Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the picture that this crisis affects a lot more than Michigan is sinking in.

"What many have lost sight of is that this is not simply a GM story or simply an auto story," he said. "It's a story at the center of the economy — are we going to have a manufacturing base?"

Contributing: Jim Kuhnhenn and Ken Thomas, Associated Press