By Corrinne Hess, Wisconsin Public Radio
Distributed by Wisconsin Watch
Some homeowners near the proposed Foxconn facility in the village of Mount Pleasant, near Racine, are decidedly unhappy with the way the village government has used – or misused – its power to take their property for public purposes.
In late summer 2017, Cathy and Rodney Jensen started hearing rumors that their Mount Pleasant neighborhood could be changing massively, due to plans for a huge Foxconn flat-screen manufacturing plant that had been announced a month earlier. The Taiwanese company said it was planning a 20-million-square-foot complex and promised 13,000 jobs for the state.
The Jensens had owned a home there for more than 20 years, on nearly three acres close to the planned Foxconn development. Cathy Jensen said she went to a couple of village board meetings to get more information, but it was “useless.”
Then, like dozens of fellow homeowners, the Jensens received a relocation order from Mount Pleasant.
“They said that they needed .13 acres of our frontage for a road project … but they would be generous and offer us basically twice the amount and buy our whole property — our whole three acres,” Jensen said.
Wisconsin law gives municipalities the power to acquire private property using eminent domain as long as there is fair compensation and the property will be used for a public purpose. This is typically for road improvements, or sometimes to take control of dilapidated property.
As of late July of 2019, the village had paid just over $152 million for 132 properties to make way for Foxconn, plus $7.9 million in relocation costs, according to village records obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio and analyzed by Wisconsin Watch.
The records show the village threatened eminent domain against some homeowners, saying their property was needed for road improvements. But in some cases those plans changed or were dropped even before the homes — some of them newly built — were bulldozed, state records show.
Village says acquisitions were directed by state
Mount Pleasant Project Director Claude Lois said in written answers to questions that the acquisitions were at the direction of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and were needed for public roads and utility improvements.
“While the (Foxconn) project has evolved, neither the purpose of those acquisitions, nor the need for the acquisitions, has changed during this process,” he said.
Lois added that the village has worked “diligently” to secure voluntary agreements with property owners of the approximately 130 parcels and has succeeded in doing so “in the vast majority of cases.”
“In all cases it has paid $50,000 per acre of land and 140 percent of appraised value for homes, plus the full package of relocation benefits,” Lois said.
Property bought — then they sued
The Jensens received a series of letters from the village seeking to buy their property. They ignored them, Cathy Jensen said, “so (the village) assumed we agreed” to the sale.
Around April 2018, “We got a letter basically saying that they own our house now,” Cathy Jensen said. “We own your house and we’ll be very, you know, very generous and let you stay there rent-free until September 2019.”
The Jensens are still living there. According to village documents, $569,300 is sitting in a bank account for the Jensens, but they do not plan to touch it. Doing so, they say, means giving up.
Instead, they have filed two lawsuits, one in federal court and one in Racine County Circuit Court. The Jensens argue they were offered far less than other property owners.
They also argue the village has no right to take the property to benefit a private business — Foxconn — or to take more than the .133 acres cited in the relocation order, according to a motion that seeks to consolidate the two cases in federal court.
A Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) official said in an affidavit that the Jensen property was needed as part of a “protective purchase” of land to fulfill DOT’s plan to remove property owners’ access to the frontage road in order to improve traffic flow and safety.
Offers to owners differ widely
When land acquisition for Foxconn began, owners with “excess land” were offered options for $50,000 per acre, which the Jensens’ federal lawsuit claims is seven to 10 times the fair market value of the property. Homeowners, on the other hand, were offered 1.4 times the value of their properties.
The suit claims the road project was a “pretext” to make them sell land “which will not be directly utilized for the road and utility expansion project so that it can be conveyed to Foxconn, or held for Foxconn’s benefit.”
The Jensens were part of a federal lawsuit with several other property owners living in the Foxconn area. The Jensens are the only ones remaining in the suit, which is in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
“Most of them could not continue their stance on fighting either because of monetary reasons … (or) it was too much mentally on some of them,” Cathy Jensen said. “(The village) told some people that if they didn’t sell voluntarily that they were going to use eminent domain, and eminent domain only guaranteed them fair market value for their property and they wouldn’t possibly receive the extra 40 percent that the town was very ‘graciously’ offering them.”
Road reconstruction finished last summer
The road reconstruction in front of the Jensens’ house – the one the village said was the reason for acquiring their property – was finished last summer. The Jensens even got a new driveway out of it.
But, said Lois, “While WisDOT has not yet physically closed access to the Jensen parcel … it still plans to do so.”
Cathy Jensen believes the village’s real goal is to secure their land for Foxconn.
“This property was supposed to be here forever — for our kids and our grandkids,” she said.
Owners of the nearby Land of Giants pumpkin patch fought — and won a temporary reprieve — against the village’s efforts to buy their land and buildings for the Highway 11 road project related to Foxconn. After the suit was filed last fall, Mount Pleasant withdrew its demand for sale of two parcels totaling more than 200 acres.
The village said it needed 3.3 acres for the road project and “temporary” easements on 5.3 acres that would have resulted in the loss of the home of Land of Giants’ owners David and Brenda Creuziger, a barn used for the pumpkin business and access to Highway 11.
So far, village records show Creuziger Farms has been paid $28,000 for right of way on the two parcels — a fraction of the cost of buying the entire parcels. Creuziger Farms made the same legal arguments as the Jensens, claiming the offer was “a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent the prohibition against taking private property for a non-public purpose.”
The second part of this analysis will be published on Thursday, Sept. 5
Note: the home page image is a drone photo taken by Coburn Dukehart, Wisconsin Watch. It shows the Foxconn site in the village of Mount Pleasant as it appeared this past July 1.
Wisconsin Watch Managing Editor Dee J. Hall contributed to this report, which was produced by Wisconsin Public Radio and the nonprofit Wisconsin Watch, (www.WisconsinWatch.org), which collaborates with WPR, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.