Foxconn-area residents angry over plans to take their homes

Angry homeowners on Tuesday challenged the authority of Mount Pleasant to take their property for the Foxconn project, with some vowing to press the fight against the village on the issue.

At a public hearing attended by more than 70 people, about a dozen residents whose homes may be taken by eminent domain laid into village officials for the way they are seeking to amass the land for Foxconn Technology Group’s planned electronics factory and associated development.

“Now you’re stuck with homeowners who have brains who are going to fight you about this,” said Christy Hall, who owns a home and 1.2 acres in a small subdivision on the planned site of Foxconn’s 22-million-square foot manufacturing complex.

Chief among the residents’ complaints: being offered 1.4 times the market value of their small parcels while large landowners got several times the going rate for their property, and the village’s proposal to declare 2,800 acres in the Foxconn district a blighted area.

Kimberly Mahoney, who has been a vocal critic of the village’s approach, said “professional land grabbers” had made millionaires of the area’s farmland owners.

“Now they’re going to try to get all the small parcels on the cheap,” said Mahoney, who lives at 10640 Prairie View Drive.

Other homeowners and their advocates, meanwhile, called the plan to declare the mostly agricultural Foxconn district a blighted area “absurd,” “a ruse,” “a sham,” “fraudulent” and a “farce.”

“How on God’s earth can a beautiful agricultural area be considered blighted?” said Kim Janicek, 4204 Highway H.

But Alan Marcuvitz, an attorney for the village, 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.

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.”

With the $10 billion Foxconn manufacturing campus up and running, the total property value of the area will be 82 times what it is now, Marcuvitz said.

Mahoney, however, said the village’s tactic threatens to “create a situation in which no private property in Wisconsin is ever protected from the government abusing its eminent-domain authority.”

The situation is drawing attention beyond southeastern Wisconsin. On hand at Tuesday’s hearing was Anthony Sanders, senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that litigates “to limit the size and scope of government power.”

Sanders said the village has no right to take single-family homes by eminent domain. Wisconsin law, he said, prohibits use of eminent domain to take single-family homes when the land is to be given to a private party such as Foxconn, unless the area’s crime rate is three times that of the surrounding community.

“You know this,” Sanders told members of Mount Pleasant’s Community Development Authority, which conducted Tuesday’s hearing. “…Those people are going to win.”

Afterward, he called the village’s land-acquisition approach in the Foxconn area “the most aggressive use of eminent domain I’ve ever heard of.”

Whether the homeowners who are balking at the village’s current offer “win” may depend on the definition of victory.

Mount Pleasant already has acquired, or has under contract, almost all of the roughly 1,200 acres on which Foxconn plans to build its manufacturing complex. That tract is bounded by the I-94 frontage road on the west, Braun Road on the north, Highway H on the east and Highway KR on the south.

The rest of the land in question is slated for future Foxconn expansion, construction staging and other development.

The vast majority of the 1,200 acres where Foxconn first will build is farmland. The handful of holdout homeowners all are on the perimeter. Foxconn conceivably could build around their properties, leaving them to live beside an immense factory with thousands of employees and all the traffic that would entail.

Which suggests what, for many, may be the central issue — the contrast between the village’s offer to pay them 1.4 times the market value of their property and the far bigger ratio owners of farmland are getting.

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The deals with the farm owners were cut last summer, when the village still was competing for Foxconn and was seeking to put together enough land to present to the company as a viable site.

Owners of the larger, open parcels were offered $50,000 an acre. Observers have said that’s several times more than the going price for farmland in the surrounding area — an assessment supported by sales in the designated Foxconn zone itself.

Within the Foxconn zone, four different parcels of open land sold between 2011 and 2014 at prices ranging from about $4,300 an acre to just under $8,000 an acre, real estate records filed with the state show. Another parcel, just outside the Foxconn zone and close to the I-94 interchange at Highway 11, sold in 2016 for $12,300 an acre.

The Community Development Authority is expected to vote April 17 on whether to declare the Foxconn area blighted. Property owners can file written comments with the village until April 4.

The authority’s vote will be a recommendation to the Village Board. Two thirds of the trustees — five of the seven — will have to approve the blighted-area designation for it to pass.

Some of the homeowners who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing are suing Mount Pleasant in federal court, arguing, among other things, that they should get much more for their property than the village has indicated it will offer.

Not appearing were representatives of the Creuziger family, who own 420 acres in the Foxconn area and have turned down the village’s $50,000-an-acre offer for open land. Their attorney has said the property is worth substantially more.

The Creuzigers' land is not in the area that will be the initial site of Foxconn's factory. Rather, it is just to the north, in a tract designated for future expansion.