What happened to Foxconn plant in Wisconsin? A look at the $1.2 billion spent and where it all went

In 2018, President Donald Trump came to southeast Wisconsin to proclaim the coming of “the eighth wonder of the world.”

He was standing on a plot of land near Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin – a mostly-rural village of 27,000 people nestled between Racine to the east, and Interstate 94 to the west.

That “eighth wonder” was a sprawling new manufacturing plant, to be built in Mount Pleasant by a giant Taiwanese tech company called Foxconn, which promised to hire more than 13,000 local people to build high-definition TV screens.   

Local and state officials said it would be the beginning of a technological renaissance in the area, which they planned to call “Wis-con Valley.”

It never happened. 

But, over the past seven years, the toll it took on Mount Pleasant residents, the billions of dollars it sucked from state and local coffers and the virtually-barren land that’s been left in its wake are a painful lesson on what can happen when public officials jump on an opportunity without really studying a company’s history and listening to citizens, before committing more than $1 billion of those citizens’ money on a project that didn’t make a lot of sense in the first place.

It seemed great on paper, according to Larry Tabak, who wrote the book Foxconned: Imaginary jobs, Bulldozed Homes & the Sacking of Local Government. 

“The idea of 13,000 good-paying jobs in an area that had been decimated by the de-industrialization of America -- and the fact that these were manufacturing jobs – all the better, because that was part of the MAGA promise," Tabak said,

To land the project, Mount Pleasant village officials quickly voted to give Foxconn more than four square miles of land, which is the equivalent of the entire size of some Chicago suburbs. They did so by declaring that property -- then-occupied by long-time residents and farmers -- as “blighted.” That allowed those properties to be bought up and taken over by the government through what’s known as “eminent domain.”

“But they didn’t talk to anyone,” Tabak said. “There was no referendum on whether Foxconn was welcome there.  It was just ramrodded through. ‘We have the power of eminent domain and we have blighted your farm.’ And people would stand up and say, ‘What do you mean you’ve blighted my farm? It’s beautiful – I’ve taken great care of it.’ ‘Nope. Sorry. We call it blighted.’”

The land was just the beginning. 

Over the next several years, Tabak, along with other government watchdog groups, found that state and local officials spent more than $1.2 billion of public money to build wide new highways and construct water and sewer and electrical systems for Foxconn. They also used that money to hire a large team of attorneys, consultants and contractors.

Several residents had spoken out at village meetings before their land was taken and their properties were destroyed.

Still, some of their common-sense questions were never addressed, like those of Ronald Hoegsted, a resident who lost his home to the Foxconn project.

“Why would you come to the United States of America, and use our workforce, when your own workforce is cheaper over there?” Hoegsted said.

Tabak said other residents raised similar concerns about the proposed project. 

“It just didn’t make economic sense, it didn’t make manufacturing sense, it didn’t make industrial sense," he said.

What’s more, a quick look at Foxconn’s track record before it came to Wisconsin revealed a pattern of past problems.

“One of the big ones,” Tabak said, “was their propensity to overpromise – and underdeliver.”

Indeed, Foxconn had previously backed off promises to create jobs at facilities in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and several cities abroad. The company had also previously made headlines when nearly two dozen Foxconn workers in China jumped to their deaths, causing the company to install nets to stop the falls of future employees.

So what caused Foxconn to make all these new promises in Wisconsin?

Tabak pointed something out from President Trump’s first term that could ring true today.

“Keep in mind that [foreign companies] were being threatened with a lot of tariffs. And [Foxconn wasn’t] the only Asian company that came into the White House and said, ‘We want to spend lots of money in the United States.’ And that was a very welcome message for the Trump Administration," he said.

Fairly quickly after the public money was committed, however, Foxconn gradually reduced its plan to build high-definition TV screens at its future Mount Pleasant facility. 

First, it scaled down to making smaller TV screens for cars. Then, the company shrunk its plans even further to assembling coffee kiosks. Then it scaled things down even more to what it looks like now: running a relatively small “storage” facility with fewer than 1,200 jobs. The company also rents out its virtually-empty “landmark building” – a large silver globe that looms over the mostly-vacant land – for events.

In the end, according to Tabak’s research, the small village of Mount Pleasant, spent more than $100 million dollars in its mostly-failed attempt to get Foxconn to come to the village. That’s money it won’t re-coup for decades.

“It’s particularly heartbreaking for those people who were so literally bull-dozed to make this possible," Tabak said.

Many residents in Mount Pleasant are now bound by non-disclosure agreements after settling a series of lawsuits filed in the wake of this saga.

But there may be a bit of hope now.

Microsoft bought a portion of the large swath of Foxconn land and is building a new server farm, which will employ a few hundred workers. Microsoft paid more than $100 million for the land. Not to Mount Pleasant, but to Foxconn, since it still owns the property.