Sorry Racine County- Foxconn's getting your land, one way or the other

You knew this headline was coming with the Fox-con, but it’s going to be even uglier than we thought. “Eminent domain may be used to acquire land for Foxconn from holdouts.”

The first part of that process would involve the Village of Mount Pleasant using state law to condemn the land where the Foxconn plants will be built.

The move could see the village declare the entire 2,900-acre designated Foxconn area — the great majority of it now open farmland — to be a blighted area under state law, but not in the commonly understood meaning of blight….

Under the law, such an area doesn’t have to be a crime-ridden slum; it also can be a predominantly open area that, because of diverse ownership, obsolete platting and even for unspecified reasons, “substantially impairs or arrests the sound growth of the community.”

Part of the reason the Village of Mount Pleasant and their attorney Alan Marcuvitz want to take the land is to clear the way for the Wisconsin DOT to start work on their $134 million effort to widen local roads near Foxconn.

And if people don’t like the idea of their land being taken and/or having a massive increase in traffic in front of their home? Then Marcuvitz and Mount Pleasant will put the screws to them.

Like most such projects, the plans here will involve taking slices of private property alongside the roads so they can be widened.

But the Foxconn-area road-improvement plans likely will go a step further: According to village officials, the DOT will shut off road access to the parcels inside the Foxconn area.

So owners who balk at selling their property for the Foxconn project would be left landlocked. And their parcels, inaccessible from the roads, would be what Marcuvitz described as “uneconomic remnants” with little or no value.

Classy, eh?



Sure, Foxconn gave the village $60 million in late December to buy up land for the campus, but as another article from the Racine Journal-Times shows us, the village is spending much more than that for this scam project.

As of Monday, Marcuvitz said, between $82 and $85 million in total land purchase options were in hand in the three Foxconn areas combined. The village exercised all of those options and now owns those roughly 1,7090 acres. Most purchases of large tracts of land are being made for $50,000 per acre.

Marcuvitz said he and Village Foxconn Project Director Claude Lois will seek Village Board approval next Monday to buy another group of properties totaling another 300 to 400 acres. In rough numbers, Marcuvitz said, that would give Mount Pleasant about 2,100 acres under contract in the three Foxconn areas, or about three-quarters of the 2,894 acres in Foxconn areas I, II and III.

Hope the people of Mount Pleasant enjoys the property tax spike that’s coming from all of the extra borrowing and extra services that are needed to buy up all this land (if they still have a home, that is). They'll probably like it as much as the rest of us are enjoying seeing so many of our tax dollars funneled down to the SE corner of the state to pay for this boondoggle.

It fact, it seems like the only people making out on this deal are the Foxconn corporates, Walker cronies, and land dealers. Funny how that works.