What Foxconn’s really doing in Wisconsin, with Reply All’s Sruthi Pinnamaneni

What happens when a large, multinational electronics company shows up in rural Wisconsin and cuts a major development deal? This week on the interview episode of The Vergecast, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sat down with Reply All producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni to discuss her recent reporting on Foxconn and the company’s subsequent tensions and dealings with the people of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

Below is a brief, edited transcript of Nilay’s conversation with Sruthi on how Mount Pleasant moved people out of their homes to make way for Foxconn.

Nilay Patel: They’re moving people out of their homes, and they’re paying a lot of money — they’re paying $30,000 an acre — but they’re asking people to leave. There was one gentleman who was in a wheelchair, and he needed to make his new house accessible, and they won’t give him the money. And just listening to that, I was heartbroken.

Sruthi Pinnamaneni: Yeah. It’s so hard to imagine why the village decided to do it this way. In the negotiations with Foxconn, the parcel of land that they needed to get ready for Foxconn right away — so they gave themselves a deadline of August 1st. So by August 1st, they had to get about 60 homeowners off of this very large, almost two-square-mile area of land. And the way they did it was the village said, “Foxconn, you don’t need to go individually and do the buyouts and buy the land. We will do it for you.” In fact, the village is also paying for that land. They took out, I believe, over $100 million in loans just to pay for the land. So the village, your village, is paying a mortgage on land that they collected from their own residents, and gave — not sold, not rented — gave to Foxconn.

Nilay: That’s insane.

Sruthi: It is… odd. It’s not what you expect a village to do. They’re not set up to do this kind of operation. They’re not real estate brokers. So, everybody I spoke to, even people who were for the deal, who lived on that land and had to move out, said the process was so chaotic and so many things fell through the cracks. There was all this confusion about money, who was going to get it, how to get the relocation fees. And I think most of the people just took the deal that the village was offering because they know the village is doing this, so the threat of eminent domain was always hanging above the whole process. There wasn’t room for negotiation.

For more on this story, check out The Verge’s recent interview with Sruthi Pinnamaneni.