Now even the locals are planning for the Fox-con to come up short...and to get bailed out

Good work by Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to get actual emails and documents that show the local yokels who have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Foxconn are looking at their escape plan if/when this thing fizzles out.

The numbers and details come from a meeting a few months ago between the Village of Mount Pleasant and officials from the Wisconsin Department of Administration, and looked at the increasing reality that the Fox-con won't be all that we were told it was going to be.

The team, which included consultant Ehlers Inc., estimated Foxconn’s project and other developments in a Mount Pleasant tax incremental financing district would soon be worth $522 million. That’s about 37% of the $1.4 billion value the district is supposed to achieve by 2023.

The team's views on the project were included in a four-page outline released Friday by Racine County under the state’s open records law. The outline was produced for a September meeting on the project involving officials from the county, Mount Pleasant and the state Department of Administration.

$522 million doesn't come close to the $913 million that Mount Pleasant has borrowed for the Foxconn Tax Incremental District, money that they are borrowing and paying back today, in the hope that Foxconn will be paying it back in taxes later due to higher land values.

In addition, Marley notes a part of Mount Pleasant's plan that figures one of the ways out of this mess is to over-assess the value of whatever Foxconn builds (assuming they do build it).

Most of the estimated value in the tax incremental district — $400 million — would come from a huge plant Foxconn plans to build. The remaining $122 million in value would come from a server building, data center, substation and other developments....

The outline did not describe how the team reached that conclusion. The facility is expected to have a footprint of 1 million square feet, and an assessment of $400 million would give it a value of $400 per square foot.

It's possible the plant will ultimately have more than 1 million square feet because of mezzanines and office space that could be built, which would bring the value per square foot down. Still, the value appears to be far above that of other manufacturing facilities in Wisconsin, which are valued at well below $40 per square foot in most cases, according to people familiar with manufacturing assessments.

Oh, I'm sure the execs at Foxconn will just shrug and accept that inflated assessment.

WRONG. They'll avoid paying any taxes at all, and pay lawyers to challenge the assessment in court, tying up Mount Pleasant for years and forcing them to take on extra costs to argue the case. This is a common practice among many large corporations in Wisconsin, and we've seen the grifters at Foxconn are even seamier than that crowd.

Which means the Village of Mount Pleasant will have even LESS money coming in than expected, in a time when it is already facing financial difficulty from the extra debt it has to take on to build up (unneeded) infrastructure for this scam.

Remember, Mount Pleasant is already taking on another $112 million in debt this year in order to pay off another $143 million in debt and infrastructure.

And in 2019, Mount Pleasant only got $8.4 million in taxes back from Foxconn to pay for all of these tax-funded gifts, meaning the homeowners left in the Village have to pay much more on their property taxes to make up the difference.

But don't worry, Marley notes that if the Foxconn development fizzles out, they'll just ask the rest of us in Wisconsin to bail them out.

In such a situation, there would not be enough money available to pay for operating costs and some debt, according to the outline. The local governments would face a shortfall even if they deferred sewer projects and abandoned plans to build a new fire station.

If the project were to hit bumps in the road, state taxpayers could have to cover up to $120 million in debt for local governments, according to an agreement with the state.

That seems to be light, as the "moral obligation clause" in the Fox-con package covers up to 40% of the debts that the local yokels have to take on. I assume they are figuring that their higher land value assessments will mean that Mount Pleasant is "only" $300 million in the hole. But what if the Village doesn't get that amount? Then I'd assume the price tag to the state would rise higher (if we choose to pay it).

This story and other recent developments seem to show the groundwork being laid for an escape hatch. The people on the inside know the Fox-con isn't going to be anything resembling what was sold, and now they're trying to figure out how to sell the failure to the public.

Time for the Evers Administration to play hardball with both this grifting company, and the GOP crooks at the local and state level, and let neither of them off the hook for the lies and costs that the rest of us will have to take on due to this scam that had a lot more to do with Scott Walker's 2018 election campaign than it had to do with any kind of economic development.