Bad news from Detroit hit home in Nebraska Thursday when Chrysler Corporation announced nine dealerships are slated to lose their franchise.

Chrysler plans to eliminate 789 of its dealers by June 9th including nine in Nebraska. The plan is part of Chrysler’s bankruptcy restructuring filed Thursday in a New York bankruptcy court.

The nine dealers slated to lose their franchise in Nebraska are in Arapahoe, Auburn, David City, Hastings, Lincoln, Milford, Omaha, Scottsbluff Bluff and West Point.

While Chrysler is trying to preserve financial stability, some believe this is an unnecessary step.

One of those is Russwood in Lincoln.

Loy Todd is president of the Nebraska New Car Dealers Association and says this will hurt Chrysler in Nebraska.

“Maybe there's only one Chrysler product or several, and so the consolidation of those is pretty devastating. The real key to that is the elimination of competition,” said Todd.

The President Obama task force for overseeing Chrysler’s restructuring wants Chrysler to have a more compact network of dealers making it more efficient. But Todd says that's equivalent to reducing customers.

“It's hard to make a straight faced argument that someone who invests all their own money in this enterprise is somehow a burden on the person selling that product. How can you have too many customers?” questioned Todd.

But Chrysler says the nearly 800 dealerships it's eliminating represent just more than 10 percent of the company's sales.

With fewer dealers, Chrysler is hoping to boost sales numbers at car dealers left open.

Even so, Todd says dealer is responsible for 100 percent of the investment and Chrysler pays nothing to have these dealerships open.

“All the signs, the employees, the building, everything about that dealership is the expense of the dealer and not the manufacturer, so any argument about savings is really fiction,” said Todd.

As for the fairness of eliminating dealerships, Todd says that should come down to pure and simple capitalism.

“If dealers are going to continue to be eliminated let the marketplace decide it. Let competition between people make that decision, not some arbitrary group appointed by the president.

Russwood is the only Chrysler dealership in Lincoln and it released a statement today saying its company has 80 years of history in Lincoln, and has no intention of leaving. According to the statement, Russwood will focus for now on pre-owned sales and its service operations.