Sept. 1, 2022 9a
(WGTD)---With $200 million in debt hanging over the village, and Foxconn’s campus just a fraction of its originally-promised size, Mt. Pleasant village officials should be more forthcoming over the possibility that the Taiwan-based company could default on its obligations to the village. That was the bottom-line message of a panel of Foxconn skeptics at a forum held Wednesday evening at Gateway Technical College in Racine. It was organized by a group that calls itself a Better Mt. Pleasant.
Beginning next year, Foxconn is supposed to make annual tax payments to the village as if its Mt. Pleasant operation was as big as originally planned. Panelist Gordon Hintz, a former state Assembly minority leader and Foxconn critic, says by his calculations that amounts to a penalty payment of $17 million. “I’m not saying they’re not going to pay it,” Hintz said. “I just don’t think they’re going to pay it (through)...2047 or whenever.”
Mt. Pleasant officials continually express an air of confidence that enough protections are in place to prevent a financial catastrophe.
David Merriman is a professor in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. He says it’s a real possibility that Foxconn could try to skip or delay payments, and the matter could wind up in the courts. He suggests that the village board speak publicly about contingencies and options.
Kathleen Gallagher, an economic development expert who writes a business column for the Journal Sentinel, goes a step further and says village officials should at least consider suing Foxconn for fraud, saying a case could be made that Foxconn never seriously planned to build out the campus as advertised. “I think it would be perfectly reasonable to go to local officials—the village and county—and ask them what legal recourse they have,” she said. “Not that they have to do it but just get them to hire a law firm and say here are the parameters of how we could sue for breach of contract and fraud.”
Neither village or Foxconn officials attended the forum, although event organizers said they had been invited.
Mt. Pleasant village officials are trying to find new industries to fill the gap left by Foxconn’s downsizing. Hintz said he believes the acreage has a lot going for it, while Gallagher said one negative is the lack of a top research university in close proximity.
Hintz was among those who raised red flags from the start, saying Wednesday night that there are many lessons to be learned. “If you’re going to take taxpayer money the part of that you need to get right is you have to be transparent and you have to be accountable,” he said, adding that he believed the public would’ve been much more sympathetic to the company’s plight if it admitted upfront that its original plan wasn’t viable. “Instead they continued to just gaslight, and snow and lie.”
The fourth panelist was Lawrence Tabak, author of “Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government.”
The event was moderated by Nilay Patel, a Racine native who co-founded “The Verge.”
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