Racine County, the Village of Mount Pleasant and Foxconn have until the end of the month to finish a development agreement that’s part of a $764 million local incentive for the company, according to the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed Friday.
The three parties to the agreement would seek to sign it no later than Nov. 30 and the company wants to start construction of the first phase of its facility no later than Oct. 1, 2018. Local and company officials have said groundbreaking would likely take place around April of next year.
The local incentive package is scheduled to be considered by the Mount Pleasant Community Development Authority on Oct. 18 and by the village board on Nov. 13.
Local officials structured the memo in a similar fashion as the one Foxconn and state officials signed in late July. The state memo established a Sept. 30 deadline for an agreement, but the company and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. are still working out the final details of a contract.
Mark Hogan, WEDC secretary and chief executive officer, said in late September neither side was concerned with the Sept. 30 deadline.
The local memo largely mirrors the terms of a tax incremental financing (TIF) district project plan released last week after Mount Pleasant was announced as the site of Foxconn’s $10 billion, 20-million-square-foot LCD manufacturing campus.
In the memo, Foxconn agrees to guarantee $1.4 billion in incremental value for the TIF district, pay a special assessment for infrastructure upgrades in the area of its initial facilities, provide $60 million in cash for the village and county to acquire additional land and cover the interest costs for the acquisition of land that could eventually be used by suppliers.
In exchange, the village and county would make hundreds of millions of dollars of improvements to the infrastructure in the southwest portion of the village. The company could also receive $100 million in incentives and the money from the special assessment and land acquisition, if the TIF has enough available revenue.
The agreement also gives the company six years from the start of 2018 to construct its initial campus, conditioned on the planned infrastructure improvements and necessary permits and approvals.
Foxconn would also be required to create 13,000 new full-time jobs “the majority of which will be in Racine County,” the memo states. The timeline for the creation of those jobs will match the timeline expected to be included in the yet to be released contract with WEDC.
