MOUNT PLEASANT, WI JANUARY 24 2022 – Numerous factors are considered when a
well-managed corporation like Intel makes a decision about locating a $20 billion investment. They are meticulous in their due diligence. Imagine if there was an entire book recently published by a top academic publisher about one of their prospective sites. Is there a chance they’d miss it?
And what would they find as they read through “Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government” by Lawrence Tabak?
That Mount Pleasant leadership had been something of a laughingstock in the national podcast, ReplyAll, showing enormous personal and cultural insensitivity. That this same leadership had misled and used deception to acquire land from their own taxpaying constituents. That the people who controlled the land they’d be using had created a large and bitter divide in their community by their mismanagement of the Foxconn deal, and their imprudent spending of $382 million dollars in support of it.
And that’s not counting the Village Project Director, the guy they’d be dealing with on a daily basis, who now says he’s not the Foxconn Project Director, but more like TID 5 Director. TID 5, the plot of land where Intel’s new plant would have been situated for decades to come. This same director who has demonstrated questionable management practices in his billing of Mount Pleasant for $1.23 million, and a preference for crony vendors and consultants, and whose main resume builder was a fraudulent and failed golf course development.
After the public humiliation of losing out to Lordstown in September to build electric vehicles, do you honestly believe the current Mount Pleasant leadership team could attract any larger venture, one that wouldn’t perform a minimum amount of research into a community to place a multi-billion dollar investment? Can you imagine trying to recruit a highly-paid, specialized workforce to relocate to a community with such a long public record of dissension and malfeasance?
For Intel it was an easy call. “Ohio, here we come!”
