Vos's district has Foxconn road-building bloat. Now the ingrate is not satisfied.

Robin Vos is continuing what will be a four-year attack on Gov. Evers by complaining that the state is now short-changing small-town and rural road construction through a completely rational gubernatorial distribution statewide of a relatively modest $75 million.

Given Vos's inclination to throw many more millions to the road-builders and gaudy state subsidies and tax breaks for big business in far greater amounts, it's surprising that he'd even notice the gubernatorial distribution, let alone weigh in about it and open himself to provable allegations of hypocrisy and partisan self-service.

Apparently the WI GOP Assembly caucus computers have word-processing programs that create text while simultaneously blocking Google searches or The Wayback Machine.

Did that GOP fact-killing computer delete this information which explains why state road programs were deliberately drained so Vos' precious Foxconn project could begin to suck up way more road-building cash than Evers is distributing without Vos's imaginary rubber-stamp of approval?

State shifts $90M in road funding to Foxconn projects

Does Vos think we will not remember that the state is spending $542 million on Foxconn-related roadwork that is in or connects to Vos's legislative district - -  road funding which Vos and other Republicans pushed through the legislature?

An updated calculation of the public assistance provided to Foxconn shows that the costs have risen as high as $4.5 billion when multiple forms of assistance from state government, local governments, and utilities are included. This letter from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau describes the various categories of Foxconn public assistance. 

• $542 million for roads, including $408 million in general state tax dollars for the I-94 North-South corridor. This improvement isn’t specific to the Foxconn development, but the Legislative Fiscal Bureau included it in the letter describing Foxconn costs because no money had been requested for the project prior to the Foxconn development. The state is also anticipated to pay for an additional $134 million of improvements to smaller roads associated with the Foxconn site.

In fact, an industry website pegged the Foxconn-related road work at 15% or so higher:

Foxconn drives more than $630M in Wisconsin road work

• The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) has taken on more than $630 million of infrastructure improvements spurred by construction of the $10 billion Foxconn Technology Group's flat-panel display factory in Mount Pleasant (Racine County), Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Business News reported. Approximately $500 million will go toward widening a portion of Interstate 94 and $134 million to upgrading local roads around the facility. 

...Major projects like the Foxconn factory often make it necessary for state transportation departments to beef up surrounding infrastructure, particularly if the project is one that will generate a considerable amount of additional traffic...the thousands of construction workers and employees who will travel to and from the factory site in the coming years will need adequate infrastructure in place to do so efficiently...

I'm sure Vos and the district's GOP State Senator remember they got millions in new road spending committed in a bill for the Foxconn project even before a shovel of dirt was turned on the company's Racine County site:

The bill allows for more than $250 million in borrowing for the I-94 north-south project, which extends from the Illinois state line through Racine County and up to General Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee....

“With how interested the president has been in getting this deal done, it makes perfect sense because it’s one of the things Foxconn needs,” said Vos, R-Rochester....

State Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, applauded the inclusion of I-94 funding in the bill.... “It is absolutely critical to restart this road project to ensure the success of not just Foxconn, but the many other economic development opportunities that are planning to come our area,” Wanggaard said in a statement.

And this road-spending dump for Foxconn taking place as Vos and the rest of the Walkerites were starving road repairs statewide so intentionally and and so destructively that at least one county's paved roads were allowed to disintegrate into gravel.

I've been writing for years about how Scott Walker's bloated, grandiose, under-funded excessive highway expansion has simultaneously starved road repairs and turned driving in Wisconsin into a game of pothole-and-front-end repair dodging.

This road to reaction and ruin has led to its ultimate consequence at the very local level in one Wisconsin small town where a lack of funding has led to an abandonment of road repairs and the acceptance of gravel roads where pavement had long been correctly the norm.

There's a road in the western Wisconsin town of Northfield that used to be completely covered in pavement, but in the last few years, a lot has changed.

"This is where we ran out of money two years ago," said Richard Erickson, standing on a line that divides paved road from gravel.

And now Vos is complaining? 

Because Gov. Evers has allocated modest sums to transportation projects that are not part of the Vos-Walker-Foxconn Road Complex to Nowhere?

Here is an archive of Foxconn-related blog items now nearly three-years old.

We all know there is no merit to his posturing. It's just Vos playing another version of his relentless partisan game.

Trump shoveled extra federal funding for Foxconn-related road-building on top of state dollars that made Vos a happy camper. Now he's griping that rural districts aren't getting enough road-building money from the state. Perhaps this was on Vos' mind when Trump came to town a little while ago.