Trumpian promise comes up way short
As Wisconsin project shrinks, president’s upstate jabs ring empty
Perhaps the new Foxconn “factory ” built just outside of Kenosha, Wis., isn’t a bust after all.
But it’s definitely not going to be the “eighth wonder of the world,” as President Donald Trump said in 2017 when Foxconn announced a blockbuster deal with the state of Wisconsin to build a $10 billion liquid crystal display screen factory. The factory would have employed 13,000 people.
The Foxconn project had been left for dead only a few months ago after the collapse of the global LCD market. But Bloomberg reported late last month that the building that has been completed will now be used to assemble servers for Google.
New York state economic development officials had lost out to Wisconsin when trying to lure the Foxconn project to a site next to the SUNY Polytechnic Institute campus outside of Utica.
The one positive had been that the construction and engineering firm Exyte, which has
its U.S. headquarters in Albany and built the Globalfoundries computer chip factory in Saratoga County, was awarded the construction contract for the Foxconn project.
Back in 2017, Trump even needled New York state about losing the project, telling upstate New York residents they should just pack up and leave for Wisconsin, where he promised thousands of new jobs for them.
“I’m going to start explaining to people, when you have an area that just isn’t working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you’ll have another area 500 miles away where you can’t get people, I’m going to explain, you can leave,” Trump said. “It’s OK. Don’t worry about your house.”
That won’t be necessary now. News reports say that Foxconn has only spent $300 million on the project to date, with only 520 people hired.
Meanwhile, the site next to the SUNY Poly campus in Oneida County, known as the Marcy Nanocenter, already has a new tenant, Cree, a North Carolina company that makes power electronics chips.
And people in the village of Mount Pleasant, Wis., where the Foxconn building is located, are already fed up with the broken promises of the state and Foxconn, including residents who gave up their homes to make way for new roads, sidewalks and infrastructure that were supposed to be needed for Foxconn.
“The roads were supposed to be for 13,000 workers but no one is here,” local resident Sean Mcfarlane told The Guardian newspaper in a recent story on the project fallout. “What is this sidewalk for? I don’t understand it. It’s the sidewalk to nowhere.”