RACINE COUNTY — Residents that attended an informational meeting about the future of Foxconn in Racine County on Tuesday night say they are left with more questions than answers.
It was the first public meeting on the project since 2019 and was held before the Racine County Board meeting. The meeting had been scheduled for February, but weather delayed the gathering once again.
Those that attended the hour meeting were shown slides with information on what has been done on the project since it broke ground in 2018.
Foxconn had originally agreed to make a $10 billion investment in Mount Pleasant and hire 13,000 workers. Over the years, those numbers have been scaled back.
Foxconn recently agreed with the state to hire 1,450 people and invest $680 million in Racine County. The state also renegotiated its deal with the technology company, scaling back from $2.85 billion in tax subsidies to $80 million.
Kelly Gallaher represents a group of residents called “A Better Mt. Pleasant.”
“Foxconn in Mt. Pleasant is the largest failed publicly funded economic development in US history,” she said to county board memebers.
Gallaher and others are concerned with the hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements the Village of Mt. Pleasant might be on the hook for.
Kim Mahoney also attended the meeting. She and her husband refused the village’s attempt to use eminent domain to force them from their home and still reside on the corner of Foxconn’s “Area 1.”
“The place now looks blighted. We have underutilized buildings, piles of dirt and electric poles littered throughout this property and it looks ugly,” said Mahoney.
She, like others, was looking for answers to what might take place in the future now that Foxconn will have a much smaller footprint.
"They haven’t told us anything that they’ve done since 2020, except for hope that something else comes in here,” Mahoney said.
The questions from village residents mostly went unanswered, because representatives from Foxconn declined to attend the meeting.
Foxconn was set to make television and other LCD screens in Wisconsin. The plant was even considered as a location to build Fisker Automobiles last year, but the car company decided to move forward in Ohio instead.
