Foxconn pitfalls, pratfalls and shortfalls, newly-catalogued

Another H/T to Rick Rommel, who is regrettably in the most recent group of retirees from the Journal Sentinel, for this reportorial swan song and fresh compendium Friday of what Foxconn had promised and what it is delivering:  

...on multiple fronts beyond those that have been widely reported, Foxconn, which promised to build a projected $10 billion complex and create 13,000 Wisconsin jobs, has moved more slowly than it previously indicated it would. 

Among them:

• Foxconn asked in September 2018 for the scheduling of two road projects to be reversed in part because of the company’s plans to build a research institute and have it ready for occupancy in January 2020. Construction of the institute, which is to be a joint project with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has yet to begin. Its planned site remains vacant.

• Mount Pleasant was supposed to have transferred title to Foxconn six months ago for about 244 acres in the company’s primary development zone, but the village has held off until it is sure Foxconn is prepared to use the land.

• Two years into its development, Foxconn appears to have invested far less at the Mount Pleasant site than was projected in a November 2017 document that is incorporated into the state contract.

I will add this post to my continuous, since-day-one Foxconn archive, here, which now has 363 posts and hundreds more links and references. 

From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19
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A recent sample from Nov. 25th: 

Study: Foxconn subsidies could smother billions in future WI development

Yet another study lays out the perils of the Walker-Fitzgerald-Vos multi-billion taxpayer soaking for the environmentally-damaging, small-town bulldozing, GOP-serving Foxconn boondoggle:

Study: Wisconsin's Foxconn deal could depress economic activity by "tens of billions of dollars"

Readers of this blog who have followed here 30 months of continual reporting and analysis will not be surprised by yet another independent accounting that shows how blatantly the public has been misled, as the new report notes: 

Using Wisconsin’s Foxconn subsidies as an example, we have shown that under most plausible scenarios, the taxes funding the subsidies will discourage more economic activity than will be encouraged by the subsidies themselves," according to the report. "In short, the net effect of targeted economic development subsidies is likely to be negative."

And do not forget the environmental damages which defy common sense and cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. 

Walker's Foxconn giveaway bill extends his war on wetlands

...regrettably, Walker's proven conservation hostility is again on full display through the bill he crafted secretly to exempt the Foxconn development from what should be a routine Environmental Impact Statement review in the public interest, thus eliminating in advance the best method to catalogue and protect wetlands and connected resources the project would harm.

And the bill's requirement to boost slightly the amount of acreage elsewhere which the company would have to clean or repair as compensation for the losses is a sham sop to conservation because there is a shortage of such eligible, compensatory land available for such mitigation.

Also - - while there is bill's sham reliance on federal standards and law for environmental protections, Trump is already rolling back those standards with the broad public support of both Walker and our corporately-managed Attorney General, Brad Schimel.