Wisconsin Expects to Pay Foxconn $37 Million Through 2023, State Official Says

Foxconn globe in Mount Pleasant

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By Jonathon Sadowski

April 23, 2021

The tax credits are part of the state’s new and much smaller contract: $80 million from taxpayers vs. almost $3 billion under the Walker/Trump deal.

Foxconn Technology Group is expected to receive as much as $37.4 million from the state through 2023 as part of the company’s slimmed-down contract, according to a letter Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan sent Friday to the state’s budget-writing committee.

The projected payments are about half of the company’s possible tax credits laid out in the company’s new state deal brokered by Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.

State officials anticipate giving the Taiwanese tech company $29.1 million in the 2021-22 fiscal year and $8.3 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year, Brennan wrote in the letter, which was first reported on by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The payments would be the first the company receives, more than three years after it first announced plans to bring a project in Racine County.

EARLIER: From Mega-Factory to Minimal Requirements, Foxconn Reaches a ‘Right-Sized’ New Deal

A renegotiated Foxconn deal was one of Evers’ top campaign promises as a gubernatorial candidate, and he achieved that this week as he announced the company and state had agreed upon an $80 million subsidy package that now gives the company a hiring target of 1,454 employees by 2026—a reduction of nearly $2.8 billion in taxpayer liability from the original deal.

Foxconn in 2017 agreed to spend $10 billion on a sprawling LCD screen factory that would support 13,000 middle-class jobs in exchange for about $3 billion in state tax credits. Former Gov. Scott Walker and President Donald Trump heralded the deal as a rebirth of American manufacturing, with Trump referring to the proposed factory as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

The factory never came, although the company has built about 1.3 million square feet of space out of its promised 20 million square feet. But because the company failed to live up to its state contract stipulations, it never received a single dollar in tax credits.

Racine County and Mount Pleasant, who have a separate contract with Foxconn worth about $1 billion, said in a joint statement this week that they have no plans to renegotiate their local agreement with the company.

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