Village of Mount Pleasant moves toward declaring Foxconn site a 'blighted area'

Mount Pleasant’s Community Development Authority voted Wednesday in favor of declaring some 2,800 acres of mostly open farmland — the future site of Foxconn’s massive electronics factory and surrounding development — to be a blighted area.

The action, a recommendation to the Village Board, paves the way for the community potentially to exercise a controversial use of eminent domain power to acquire land from holdout property owners.

That may not be necessary. The great majority of the small landholders who have not yet sold to the village could instead see their property taken by the more conventional use of eminent domain to widen roads, if they don’t sell voluntarily.

Wednesday’s 6-1 vote followed a meeting marked by emotional statements from several homeowners and occasional bursts of applause as residents sought to make their case.

Michael Schmidt, 10514 Highway KR, said that what he had regarded as his “forever home” wasn’t just a house but part of a community that he now must abandon as he starts over in a tight housing market with rising prices.

“Do you know the stress and anxiety this brings to us?” he said. “Trying to find another property that matches up with ours and stay in our community is nearly impossible.

“Saying that this area is blighted is beyond me. We didn’t ask for this. You brought Foxconn to us, and all we want is to be treated fairly and equally as you did with our neighbors who are big landowners.”

That goes to a critical element of the dispute. To amass the sweeping tract of land needed to lure Foxconn to Mount Pleasant, the village last summer began offering $50,000 an acre to owners of large, open parcels if they would agree to sell.

The figure is several times what area farmland had been bringing before the emergence of Foxconn and its plans for a $10 billion, 22 million-square-foot factory employing thousands.

FULL COVERAGE: Foxconn updates

The village’s strategy succeeded in signing up the bulk of the larger landowners.

Then, when the community turned to the business of acquiring the dozens of small parcels that for the most part hug the roads in the area, it said it would pay 140 percent of fair market value.

That’s more than required by law, and it was enough to get many if not most of the homeowners to agree to sell. But some believe they should receive more, citing the larger multiple owners of open land have been granted.

Schmidt is among the holdouts and is one of several residents to sue Mount Pleasant over what the group alleged was unfair treatment.

Last week, Federal Judge Lynn Adelman dismissed that lawsuit, saying the plaintiffs had failed to show they were being treated differently from “similarly situated” people. The village may have rationally decided to pay more for the larger properties because of their critical importance to the project, Adelman said.

Wednesday, Erik Olsen, the attorney representing Schmidt and his neighbors, told village officials his clients plan to appeal.

“Ultimately when the dust settles, you will lose,” Olsen said.

The village doesn’t seem to think so.

“We look forward to meeting that appeal in the appropriate forum,” Alan Marcuvitz, an attorney for the village, said during the meeting.

Marcuvitz said none of the objections raised by residents at a hearing in March, and later in writing, barred the village from moving forward with the blight designation.

Marcuvitz has said Mount Pleasant is properly using a section of state law that allows an area to be declared blighted even though not a single property within it is blight-ridden in the generally understood sense of being dilapidated or decayed.

That section of the law provides a broad definition of a “blighted area” within a redevelopment zone. An area can be blighted if it is predominantly open and, because of diverse ownership, obsolete platting or even for unspecified reasons, “substantially impairs or arrests the sound growth of the community.”

RELATED: Foxconn begins to dig: Serious earth-moving starts at Racine County site

RELATED: Foxconn will need thousands of workers with entry-level skills and a high school diploma

Besides the possibility of using eminent domain to acquire some of the remaining properties in the Foxconn area, a blighted-area designation as part of a redevelopment plan would allow the Community Development Authority to borrow money by issuing bonds exempt from both state and federal tax. That could save the village $3 million, Rob Richardson, chair of the CDA, said recently in a commentary published in The Journal Times of Racine.

Except for Matthew Cramer, the lone dissenter on the vote, none of the CDA members spoke at Wednesday's meeting about their decision.

Cramer called the blight designation “baseless” and said the action was an abuse of government power.