Buying Land in Racine County, Wisconsin

Zoning: four towns under the county, and a village that recently left

Racine County Development Services (Ives Grove Office Complex, 14200 Washington Avenue, Sturtevant, WI 53177; (262) 886-8440) administers Chapter 20 of the county code, Racine County's general zoning and shoreland/floodplain ordinance, for the county's unincorporated towns. As of this research pass, that's four remaining towns -- Burlington, Dover, Norway, and Waterford -- since most of the county's other historical towns have incorporated over the years: Mount Pleasant became a village in 2003, Caledonia in 2005, and the Town and Village of Rochester consolidated into a single Village of Rochester in 2008. The county additionally administers zoning by contract for the Village of Yorkville, itself a former town that incorporated in recent years but kept the county's zoning ordinance and staff rather than standing up its own department -- a similar arrangement to what Kenosha County runs for a couple of its own villages.

The Village of Raymond is a more recent and more interesting case. The Town of Raymond incorporated as the Village of Raymond in 2019, under a provision of 2017 Wisconsin Act 58 (the same law that created the Foxconn EITM Zone) that let towns adjacent to a village containing the zone hold a streamlined incorporation referendum. For several years after incorporating, Raymond kept using Racine County's zoning by contract -- codified in its own municipal code as Chapter 26, Article V, "Racine County Zoning." That changed on October 28, 2024, when the village repealed both that arrangement and its interim post-incorporation zoning ordinance and adopted its own comprehensive Chapter 25 zoning code. If a listing, agent, or older online source describes Raymond as county-zoned, confirm you're not looking at outdated information -- as of this research pass, Raymond administers its own zoning independently.

Beyond Racine County's four remaining towns and the contract Village of Yorkville, every incorporated city and village in the county -- the City of Racine, the Villages of Mount Pleasant, Caledonia, Rochester, and Raymond, and the county's smaller villages -- runs independent municipal zoning entirely separate from the county. Racine County's zoning office also handles septic (POWTS) sanitary permitting for unsewered areas countywide, a function that, as in most Wisconsin counties, generally applies regardless of which municipality's general zoning governs a given parcel; confirm the specific arrangement for a parcel's municipality directly.

Foxconn and the Village of Mount Pleasant: a zoning and land-use story worth knowing

In 2017, Wisconsin enacted Act 58, creating an Electronics and Information Technology Manufacturing (EITM) Zone and offering Foxconn Technology Group up to $2.85 billion in refundable state tax credits to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County -- not Kenosha County, which sits immediately to the south and has its own large, separate industrial-growth story. The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County created a joint tax incremental district in November 2017 to help finance the project, initially sized around $764 million and later increased; the total project area affected roughly 2,893 acres (about 4.5 square miles) of what had been farmland and rural residential property.

That land assembly came with a genuinely contentious eminent-domain and "blighted property" designation process -- reporting from Belt Magazine, Wisconsin Watch, and other outlets documented homeowners whose properties were designated blighted and acquired, in some cases through eminent domain litigation that was still being settled years after the original announcement, with the village paying over $150 million for more than 130 properties. Act 58 also included provisions specific to this project: a wetland-permit exemption for the manufacturing zone (with a 2:1 mitigation requirement elsewhere) and the streamlined-incorporation provision, described above, that produced the Village of Raymond next door.

The project itself has been scaled back substantially from its original 13,000-jobs, roughly $10 billion pitch -- Foxconn missed the employment targets that would have triggered the original tax credits, and the state renegotiated a smaller deal (reported at up to $80 million in credits for around 1,454 jobs and $672 million in investment). As of late 2025, Foxconn announced a further $569 million expansion with 1,374 additional planned jobs and up to $16 million more in incentives, bringing its total potential tax-credit eligibility to roughly $96 million through 2029. For a land buyer, the practical takeaway is that the Mount Pleasant/Raymond area has an active, evolving industrial and TID-driven land-use picture that's worth checking against current, not 2017-vintage, sources -- see our dedicated zoning page for the fuller mechanics.

GIS/land records and other departments to know

Racine County's Mapping/GIS office ((262) 636-3548) maintains parcel mapping and an online GIS mapbook; the Register of Deeds (730 Wisconsin Avenue, Racine, WI 53403; (262) 636-3208; registerofdeeds@racinecounty.com) holds recorded deeds, easements, and plats; and the Treasurer (same address; (262) 636-3239) handles property tax payment and supports municipal assessment. Racine County Public Health's Environmental Health division (9531 Rayne Road, Suite V, Sturtevant, WI 53177; (262) 898-4460; RCPHinfo@racinecounty.com) offers free well-water test kits (the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene charges a per-test lab fee) and handles general environmental-health questions.

Extension Racine County (1072 Milwaukee Avenue, Burlington, WI 53105; (262) 767-2929) supports the county's agricultural sector, with a dedicated agriculture educator and a horticulture helpline at the department's Sturtevant office ((262) 886-8451). Racine County Land & Water Conservation, part of the Public Works and Development Services department, provides conservation cost-share programs and technical assistance for the county's remaining farmland.