Zoning in Racine County, Wisconsin: The Foxconn EITM Zone and Its Aftermath

The law: an Electronics and Information Technology Manufacturing Zone, written for one project

2017 Wisconsin Act 58 was drafted specifically to land Foxconn Technology Group's first U.S. manufacturing facility, and it created a new overlay concept in Wisconsin law: the Electronics and Information Technology Manufacturing (EITM) Zone, designated under Wis. Stat. sec. 238.396(1m). Foxconn announced in October 2017 that it would locate that zone, and its facility, in the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County. The Act paired the zone designation with up to $2.85 billion in refundable state tax credits tied to Foxconn's investment and job-creation performance -- an unusually large, single-project state incentive package even by the standards of large economic-development deals.

Two provisions of Act 58 matter specifically for land use and local government structure, beyond the tax credits themselves. First, manufacturing projects within the designated project area were exempted from standard state wetland permitting requirements, subject to a 2:1 wetland-mitigation ratio for any wetland impact -- a meaningful carve-out from Wisconsin's normal wetland-fill permitting process, limited to this specific project area. Second, the Act let a town adjacent to a village containing an EITM zone hold a streamlined incorporation referendum to become a city or village itself, without meeting Wisconsin's standard incorporation requirements, and separately restricted annexation of that town's territory during the process. That second provision is what let the Town of Raymond, immediately adjacent to Mount Pleasant, become the Village of Raymond in 2019 -- a zoning-relevant, traceable side effect of a law written for an entirely different purpose.

The tax incremental district and the eminent-domain fight

In November 2017, the Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County jointly created a tax incremental district (TID) to help finance roughly $764 million in public investment supporting the project -- infrastructure, utilities, and site preparation across a project area eventually totaling around 2,893 acres (about 4.5 square miles) of what had been farmland and rural residential property. That land assembly did not happen through voluntary sale alone: village officials designated numerous properties as "blighted" as a legal basis for acquisition, and multiple homeowners filed eminent-domain lawsuits, some running for years before final settlement. Reporting from Belt Magazine, Wisconsin Watch, and other outlets documented the village paying over $150 million for more than 130 properties, with some owners describing feeling misled about how their land would actually be used once acquired.

If you're evaluating a parcel anywhere in or near the former project footprint, the practical lesson isn't that eminent domain will recur -- Foxconn's initial land assembly is long complete -- but that this area's parcel boundaries, TID status, and zoning designations have a documented history of changing quickly and substantially under state and local economic-development pressure. A title search and current zoning map are necessary here, but so is asking the village directly whether a specific parcel sits inside the TID boundary or any related overlay district, since TID status affects how property-tax increments are captured and allocated even after the underlying land use has stabilized.

The deal today: substantially smaller than 2017, and still moving

Foxconn's actual buildout never approached its original pitch of roughly 13,000 jobs and a facility scaled for advanced LCD panel manufacturing. The company missed the employment and investment targets that would have triggered the original tax-credit structure, and the state -- under a different gubernatorial administration than the one that struck the original deal -- renegotiated a substantially smaller agreement, reported at up to $80 million in credits for around 1,454 jobs and $672 million in investment. Foxconn has continued to qualify for incremental rounds of state tax credits since (crossing roughly $52 million in cumulative subsidies as of recent reporting), and announced a further $569 million expansion in late 2025 with 1,374 additional planned jobs and up to $16 million more in performance-based incentives, bringing its total potential credit eligibility to roughly $96 million through 2029.

For a land buyer, this means the Mount Pleasant/Raymond area's zoning and economic-development picture is not a settled, decade-old fact pattern -- it has changed materially more than once since 2017 and continues to evolve with each new expansion announcement. Don't rely on any single year's news coverage (including this page's) as the final word on the project's footprint, employment, or incentive structure; confirm current status directly with the Village of Mount Pleasant or Racine County Development Services for anything time-sensitive to a specific transaction.

What to actually check on a parcel near Mount Pleasant or Raymond

1. Confirm whether the parcel sits inside the Village of Mount Pleasant, the Village of Raymond, or unincorporated Racine County -- each has a different zoning authority, and Raymond's own zoning code (adopted October 28, 2024) may still be new enough that some third-party listings or map services haven't caught up to it.
2. Ask the village directly whether the parcel sits within the Mount Pleasant/Foxconn TID boundary or any EITM-zone overlay, since TID status affects tax-increment allocation independent of the parcel's current use.
3. If the parcel is near a wetland, confirm whether it falls inside the boundary that received Act 58's wetland-permit exemption -- that exemption is specific to designated project-area parcels, not the surrounding county generally, so don't assume it applies just because a nearby parcel benefited from it.
4. Research recent, not 2017-vintage, reporting on the project's footprint and any pending expansion, since the company has continued to announce new investment phases as recently as late 2025.
5. For any Raymond-area parcel, verify with the village clerk whether Chapter 25 (the village's own current zoning code) or an older provision applies, given how recently the village left county zoning.