Foxconn's Wisconn Valley Way to be named state Highway 311; Wisconn Valley Way will be retained locally
Corrinne HessThe road to Foxconn will be a little harder to find.
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is renaming Wisconn Valley Way in Mount Pleasant to State Highway 311, according to a letter sent May 12 to Racine County residents.
The nearly three-mile stretch is located between Highway 11 and Highway KR.
Mark Niedzwiecki, an urban and regional planner with the Transportation Department, said the change is being made to make the highway more uniform with the rest of the state's highway system.
"This is just a continuation of the plan all along," Niedzwiecki said, adding that locally, the road will still be called "Wisconn Valley Way."
(The naming situation is similar to how in the Milwaukee area state Highway 145 is also known as Fond du Lac Avenue and Highway 190 is known as Capitol Drive.)
“Wisconn Valley" was the name coined by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Foxconn CEO Terry Gou. At the time, Foxconn was promising to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin in exchange for nearly $3 billion in state tax credits.
Foxconn was also going to give $100 million to UW-Madison, build innovation centers across the state and open the company's North American headquarters in downtown Milwaukee.
None of those things have happened.
Foxconn has said it has invested approximately $900 million in Wisconsin, which includes a nearly 1-million-square-foot "advanced manufacturing" facility in the village of Mount Pleasant, a 300,000-square-foot "smart manufacturing center," a 120,000-square-foot "multipurpose building" and a 100-foot-tall "high performance computing data center globe."
But it has been unclear what type of day-to-day work is actually being done in those buildings.
In December, Foxconn qualified for nearly $30 million in Wisconsin tax credits for creating 579 eligible jobs and investing $266 million in the facility.
Today, Mount Pleasant officials say the $1.4 billion spent on infrastructure for Foxconn will be worth it. They're hoping to market the property to other companies, although Foxconn has control of much of the land in Mount Pleasant for eight more years.
More:Foxconn touts value of its Racine County building that Oshkosh Corp. wanted to use to build trucks
Niedzwiecki said the situation with Foxconn has nothing to do with changing the name of Wisconn Valley Way. It is simply making it easier for the DOT to identify state-run highways.
Kelly Gallaher, who heads the watchdog group A Better Mount Pleasant disagrees.
"Sadly, Wisconsin taxpayers paid millions of dollars for a two-mile highway to nowhere," Gallaher said. "If only the Foxconn fiasco was so easily fixed for the people of Mount Pleasant by simply just changing the name."
Corrinne Hess can be reached at chess@gannett.com. Follow her @corrihess