Foxconn chooses Mount Pleasant for factory

Tech giant also hires 1st Wisconsin-based worker

Foxconn Technology Group will announce Wednesday that it will build its huge electronics factory in Mount Pleasant, in Racine County.

The long-awaited unveiling of the choice for a site — in the southwestern corner of Mount Pleasant, just east of I-94 — will come at 11 a.m. at the SC Johnson iMET Center in Sturtevant.

That will move Wisconsin one step closer to bringing in Foxconn and its ambitious plans for a liquid crystal display panel manufacturing complex that could cost as much as $10 billion and employ up to 13,000.

Another step also emerged Tuesday: Foxconn has hired its first Wisconsin-based employee — former Navy pilot Chris Murdoch, who until last month ran the Naval ROTC program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now will serve as a senior adviser to the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first identified land south of Highway 11 in Mount Pleasant in July as a prime target site for the Foxconn factory.

Over the summer, representatives of Pitts Brothers & Associates, a Kenosha-based real estate firm, began approaching property owners in that slice of southwestern Mount Pleasant, seeking options to buy their land. Some owners signed up quickly, while others held back.

Now, it appears the brokers have put together a critical mass of property, paving the way for Wednesday’s scheduled announcement.

Still unknown is just how much land will be dedicated to Foxconn, and possibly for supplier plants that could locate nearby.

The bloc where Pitts Brothers has sought options contains more than 2,000 acres bounded by Highway 11 on the north, I-94 on the west, Highway

KR on the south, and Highway H on the east. A twolane road, Braun Road, divides the bloc into roughly equal sections of a little more than 1,000 acres each. The northern section includes about 80 acres in Sturtevant.

In recent weeks, the area has seen a flurry of pre-construction activity — helicopters and drones conducting aerial surveys, drills boring into the soil for samples at multiple points, and crews flagging wetlands.

Just last week, workers from Nielsen Madsen + Barber, a civil engineering and surveying firm in Racine, spent two days identifying wetlands on one property, a landowner said. After that, he said, a crew from the state Department of Natural Resources came to check the surveying company’s work.

Foxconn has said it needs 1,000 acres for a complex whose buildings alone could cover 20 million square feet. That suggests a site either north or south of Braun Road, but recently residents have speculated that both the northern and southern sections are in play, with one used for Foxconn proper and the other for supplier firms that feed the massive factory.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s all going to get picked up,” one property owner said.

Multiple landowners have said Pitts Brothers has offered $50,000 an acre for open agricultural land — several times the going price. Buyers of farmland in Mount Pleasant over the last year generally have paid less than $8,000 an acre.

While Pitts Brothers worked over the past few months to assemble a site in Mount Pleasant, another real estate firm, Milwaukee’s Zilber Property Group, did the same six miles south, in Kenosha County. Zilber recruited landowners in an area of the Town of Paris about a half-mile west of I-94.

That site could have been annexed by the City of Kenosha, which could provide the millions of gallons of Lake Michigan water Foxconn is expected to need each day.

The Kenosha option, however, vanished last month when the city dropped its bid for Foxconn, saying it could not support the massive development without changes to state law affecting local municipalities.

That left Mount Pleasant and Racine County, both of which have more aggressively pursued Foxconn all along.

In exchange for locating its factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn would get cash incentives from taxpayers.

Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation last month authorizing up to $3 billion in taxpayer incentives to Foxconn on Sept. 17 at Gateway Technical College in Sturtevant, clearing the way for the company and the governor’s administration to negotiate and sign a final contract.

The contract still needs the approval of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. board before the deal — and the factory — can move forward.

Foxconn also will have to strike a separate deal with local officials in Racine County. It’s still unknown how much property-taxpayers there will have to spend to provide the infrastructure and services needed for the plant.

The state deal being considered by WEDC would pay up to $2.85 billion in cash to the company over 15 years to offset 17% of its qualifying payroll costs at the factory, as well as 15% of the capital costs of constructing and equipping the plant.

Foxconn’s hiring of Murdoch supplements the traveling executives and contract lobbyists who had already been working for the Taiwanese company.

“The recruitment of retired Navy Captain Chris Murdoch as senior advisor, and the strategic and administrative experience and strong links to Wisconsin he brings to Foxconn, will be of immense value to the success of our operation,” the company said in a statement confirming the hire.

The jobs website Indeed.com also lists 25 more positions in Racine with Foxconn, including jobs such as human resources manager, payroll coordinator, recruiter, finance manager and engineers.

“We look forward to announcing our recruitment plans and related timetable in the coming days and weeks,” Foxconn said in its statement.

In 2014, Murdoch arrived at UW-Madison after spending 26 years on active duty in the Navy, according to a university article on his hire. During his naval career, he flew combat missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia and commanded Carrier Air Wing Two aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.

Murdoch also has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard and a master’s degree in international security at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the article says.

Foxconn describes itself as the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. It posted roughly $135 billion in sales last year and employs hundreds of thousands of workers, most of them at the company’s plants in China.

There, Foxconn most famously manufactures the iPhone for Apple, along with products for customers such as Amazon and Sony.

Foxconn more recently has ventured into highdefinition flat screens, which it would produce in Wisconsin.