Mount Pleasant officials on Wednesday touted that Foxconn Technology Group is the projected largest taxpayer in the village, although the property owned by the company remains well short of the assessed value required by the start of 2023.
The village issued a press release highlighting comments by Claude Lois, the village’s Foxconn project director, to the village board on Tuesday evening.
Lois noted the roughly 850 acres of land conveyed to Foxconn near Braun Road and Highway H, known as Area I, now have an assessed value of more than $57.5 million, up from around $8.4 million last year.
Mount Pleasant’s mill rate will be set later this year, but based on last year’s rate, the company would pay $1.15 million in property taxes this year, according to the village’s release. The same land would have generated around $167,000 in taxes last year.
The village also has $90 million in special assessments in place on the land given to Foxconn under a developer’s agreement.
“Since the beginning of this project, we have been confident that this development would be an incredible opportunity for our Village,” said Mount Pleasant Village President David DeGroot. “Recent assessments show that the Village is beginning to reap the financial benefits of this opportunity.”
Not noted in the release is the additional $1.34 billion in assessed value the property in Area I is required to have by the start of 2023.
As part of the tax incremental financing package used to support the project, Foxconn provided a guaranty that the land in Area I would have a $1.4 billion assessed value by the start of 2023. The guarantee, and tax revenue it would generate, helps underpin the more than $900 million Mount Pleasant is investing in infrastructure, land acquisition and incentives to convince Foxconn to build its project in the village. The agreement did not rely on any property tax revenue from the rest of the 3,000-acre TIF district created for the project.
Even if the property does not reach the required value, Foxconn would pay property taxes as if it had, according to the terms of the agreement.
When Foxconn made the guarantee, the company’s project was billed as a $10 billion investment with more than 22 million square feet of facilities.
To date, the company has built a 120,000-square-foot multi-purpose building. Foxconn has also received state permits for nearly 1 million square feet of foundations for its advanced display manufacturing facility. Construction on the building is expected to begin in June with operations beginning by the end of 2020.
