Nearly 2 years later, all we know about Foxconn is that it won't be close to what was promised

Is this supposed to be impress me? Because it doesn’t.

Detailed building plans for Foxconn's flat-screen factory in Mount Pleasant show a structure of 855,000 square feet — about the size of five Walmart Supercenters.

At 1,657 feet long and 516 feet wide, the building — one story with a mezzanine — is a long rectangle 31 feet high at the outer walls. It appears the structure will have a slightly pitched roof, and a maximum height of 40 feet.

Office space inside the plant will include a "Meditation Room" and a "VR Experience Room." VR typically is an abbreviation for virtual reality.
Last week, Foxconn announced the award of $13 million in contracts for initial work on the building.

Overall, the structure as planned would be about as big as the Uline warehouse a few miles south along I-94, across from the Amazon complex. It would represent a small percentage of the 22 million square feet of facilities officials have said Foxconn will build an a campus of about 1,000 acres.

Yeah, a large warehouse was not what we were sold when this scam was announced nearly 2 years ago, when we gave Foxconn incentives well past the levels of those other projects, and all of the land was cleared and highways upgraded.

And those are just the building PLANS. Who knows what (if anything) the final building might end up being.

But remember, all Foxconn needs is a relatively small amount of jobs by the end of this year to be able to get their first checks from state taxpayers. Which led to this follow-up story by Apple News’s Josh Dzieza, who has been all over Foxconn in the past few months. While Foxconn needs to have 520 people working to get the 17% kickback on salaries for this year, Dzieza notes that’s not necessarily the case for the building itself.

For example, if Foxconn only employs 260 people at the end of this year, half its minimum target, but invests $1 billion in construction, Wisconsin could end up paying Foxconn almost $300,000 per job. Other scenarios take the cost per job above $500,000.

Jon Peacock, director of the Wisconsin Budget Project, worries that the relative ease of getting investment subsidies encourages Foxconn to build a highly automated factory rather than something employing the blue collar manufacturing workers who had featured prominently in President Donald Trump and former Governor Walker’s pitch for the deal. (It’s worth noting that Foxconn is aggressively pursuing automation in its other facilities as labor costs rise.) “I think one of the problems with the contract right now is that it makes it much easier to qualify for investment credits than job credits and that we might be incentivizing robots,” Peacock says.

On the flip side, Dzieza says that the contract the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) signed with Foxconn puts the company in a bind, because unlike the vague “jobs” incentives, it was more specific on the 15% kickback for the building.

The contract ties job subsidies to employees simply working “for the benefit of” Foxconn’s activities in the manufacturing zone, but it doesn’t require them to be doing anything in particular. When it comes to capital investment, however, the contract is more specific: the only investments that are eligible for subsidies are those needed for “the project,” which is defined as a “Generation 10.5 TFT-LCD Fabrication Facility” — not the smaller Gen 6 LCD plant Foxconn now says it will build, not a research facility, and not an “innovation center,” whatever those are.

Speaking of those “innovation centers”, Channel 2 in Green Bay had a report this week which reiterated that nothing is really happening at a couple of those locations, well over a year after Foxconn had their PR events announcing them.

“They are operating the building well, they are paying taxes on it, there are no obligations, in terms of the city outstanding, left,” said [Green Bay Economic Development Director Kevin] Vonck. “Of course we would love to see more people in the building, bringing in some more action to downtown but for the time being we are happy with them as the landlord of the building.”

It seems to be a similar story in Eau Claire where Foxconn purchased two buildings last year.

“They have pulled building permits to do the renovations so they have taken that step,” said Aaron White, Eau Claire’s economic development manager. “As far as moving forward, they’ve identified who the contractor is.”

However, White they don’t have a set timeline for completion either.

I'm sorry, but shouldn't we be seeing some kind of products being done at this point? And while we might not end up spending the $3.0 billion in state tax dollars on Foxconn because there's no way this thing is coming close to the thousands of jobs they claimed it would, we might end up even worse off because the cost per job will likely be much higher than we'd have seen if the Fox-con actually worked.

In addition, the local communities are still paying off millions of debt every year while trying to break out the party hats because Foxconn MIGHT pay $1 million in new property taxes this year. That's not a worthy trade-off.

Foxconn is not going to be the "Eighth Wonder of the World", as Trump tried to claim it would be. It'll just be a more expensive version of wasteful corporate welfare for a small factory that might have happened anyway in a time of full employment. If this deal isn't remade or torn up, Foxconn will try to ride it for as much as they can with very little to show for it in jobs for Wisconsinites.

So please, CUT THE CORD on this. Sooner than later.