The tiny town immediately west of Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion Racine County manufacturing plant developed giant ambitions in December and January.
Just across Interstate 94 from the town of Yorkville, Foxconn will soon start building an LCD screen manufacturing plant in Mount Pleasant expected to have 13,000 workers. Town officials heard predictions that Yorkville, with a population just over 3,000, could build 1,300 homes, each valued at $200,000, for those workers. If a quarter of the suppliers that Foxconn could bring to Racine County decide to plant a flag in Yorkville, it would fill nearly 1.5 million square feet of industrial buildings with 975 jobs, according to projections.
Faced with the potential for $1.3 billion in projects along the west side of Interstate 94, Yorkville officials in late 2017 mounted an effort to capture the opportunity, according to documents and emails the town released in response to open records requests. Through meetings with other local governments, town officials drew up plans to extend new infrastructure to the farmland between Highway 20 and Highway KR, and to pay for the work.
Most of those concepts didn’t become public before Yorkville’s Town Board on Jan. 22 abandoned the idea in the face of widespread opposition from residents to dense development along Interstate 94.
“We are going to go very slow, very small increments in growth and development,” Peter Hansen, chairman of the Town Board, said of the new approach.
Even though Yorkville dropped the enterprise, the discussions just a few months ago reflect Racine County officials’ new willingness to go big, and the ambition to capture as much of Foxconn’s spillover development as possible. It is likely similar conversations will happen in the future for other Racine County communities.
The big opportunity Yorkville saw is still out there. The overriding sentiment in Yorkville’s case was Racine County leaders want to capture Foxconn’s spillover housing, retail and industrial development before it migrates to surrounding counties, said city of Racine Mayor Cory Mason.
Mason was at the table for Yorkville’s planning because Racine would’ve supplied the water. Racine County Executive Jonathan Delagrave also participated since the county would have issued tens of millions of dollars in bonds to help pay for the Yorkville projects.
“If we’re going to have a lot of development come into the area, and you’ve got Kenosha with developable land to the south and Milwaukee to the north, I think he (Delagrave) was looking at how best to position Racine County,” Mason said. “There was real interest from Yorkville, but he (Delagrave) was very public about trying to maximize as much redevelopment opportunity as we could.”
Delagrave declined to discuss details of the Yorkville planning.
"It is exciting to see the extraordinary level of intergovernmental collaboration that is positioning all of Racine County to seize this transformational opportunity," Delagrave said. "I’m confident that our work together in so many areas — including water and sewer infrastructure, road and transportation improvements and workforce development and recruitment — will generate significant benefits for our entire region."
The Yorkville enterprise took off last November, a month after Foxconn confirmed plans to build its first U.S. plant in Mount Pleasant. The town hired engineering firm Short Elliott Hendrickson Inc. to do long-range planning for new development along the interstate, including a potential “smart city” mirroring concepts Foxconn officials have floated to house their workforce. By that time, the village had already retained prominent Milwaukee real estate attorney Art Harrington of law firm Godfrey & Kahn SC.
By early December, Harrington and Yorkville officials were in discussions over extending water service to the land west of I-94. That area has remained undeveloped because it does not have that needed sewer and water access. Yorkville was aiming to piggyback off of Mount Pleasant’s project to bring Lake Michigan water to the east side of the interstate for Foxconn. But to join Mount Pleasant’s project, Yorkville had to get its details in order by Jan. 24.
Yorkville and Harrington also met in early December with Zilber Property Group representatives, according to emails the town released in March. Milwaukee-based Zilber wasn’t going to develop anything itself, but instead volunteered to draw up general plans showing the potential for new buildings along I-94.
“The local project team consulted with Zilber to verify key development assumptions that were being built into a financial projection model,” said Jenny Trick, executive director of the Racine County Economic Development Corp., who also was part of the Yorkville discussions.
“There continues to be widespread development interest not only in Yorkville but throughout Racine County,” Trick added.
Zilber’s expansive vision for Yorkville had new retail along Braun Road and lining the interstate south of Braun. It had new subdivisions farther from the interstate between Braun and Highway KR, apartments in the area south of Highway 11 and new industrial buildings north of there.
The scale of those plans is major. There’s 12 million square feet of industrial buildings, 140 acres of new retail development and 1,968 new housing units, nearly 1,000 of which would be apartments or townhomes. It represents three decades of construction valued at $1.3 billion.
The Zilber outline was not distributed widely by the town as it held public hearings in mid-January to change Yorkville’s long-range plan to encourage more development along the interstate.
NEED FOR WATER
But in order for any of those projects to happen, Yorkville needed water. It also needed to incorporate into a village, an item that is up for a referendum vote on April 3.
To get water, Yorkville negotiated with the city of Racine and other surrounding governments. Mount Pleasant and Racine County were willing to discuss fronting Yorkville’s estimated $52 million share of the water and sewer costs, according to Harrington’s notes from a Dec. 28 meeting among the local government officials. Yorkville would have paid the money back using a tax incremental financing district covering the new development west of the interstate.
Beyond paying for the infrastructure work, Yorkville had to get city of Racine officials to sell water for the new developments. Mason said Yorkville dropped the plan before they could get into serious negotiations over the terms of such a deal, but a few ideas were discussed in concept.
That includes, Mason said, talks he had with Yorkville’s Hansen over Racine potentially taking over some land from the town.
“We certainly talked concepts,” Mason said.
They also discussed lowering the density of new housing that could be built near I-94 in Yorkville, which would mean fewer total houses and apartments.
“We have a city with density and we would like to reinvest in it and see it grow and, talking with Peter Hansen, it was clear Yorkville didn’t want a lot of density,” Mason said. “We have a city with 80,000 people (in Racine) with built infrastructure and we’d like people to come here.”
That underlies a secondary tension Racine faces if it is going to provide water for Yorkville, or any other surrounding community that wants to turn farmland into spillover development for Foxconn. The city of Racine wants to attract some of that new development into its borders.
“How does providing Yorkville water create opportunity, but also competition as well?” Mason said. “The questions of how to proceed with this is one that has decades of past discussion around it. For some reason the city agreed to land-lock itself and still extend water service to the rest of the county.”
Mason declined to comment on what terms the city could demand if other communities come forward with similar requests.
“Those are the city’s utilities, so we’ll have an important conversation ahead of us,” he said. “Exactly what the terms and conditions of that are, it’s too soon to say.”
Meanwhile, Yorkville is back to where it was before the Foxconn talks. Even if it incorporates into a village, the general sentiment is against development on the scale that officials pursued earlier this year.
“I’d say that’s not in the cards,” Hansen said. “I would give that a 1 percent chance.”