https://www.facebook.com/abettermtpleasant/ Super interesting comment from The Verge's explosive article on #Foxconn. The author says he is the administrator of a town in Ohio that Foxconn was considering for their "development" that we ultimately got. Hard to believe anyone would make this up - it sounds authentic: As an administrator of one the handful of communities in Ohio that was considered for this project, I can’t tell you how much I love reading these articles. We got bad vibes from the very first time we had to pitch our community for this unknown project and the numbers (jobs, investment amount, water/sewer/electric/gas requirements, etc,) started to change. Daily. Drastically. Our running internal discussion was "WTF? How can they NOT know their sewage requirements? Like 3 million gallons per day more, then a couple days later it drops by 2 million. Then back up". Worked on some big and weird projects in my career, but never saw anything like this where stuff changed all the time. The site visit was an absolute circus too. They had a damn charter bus. Around 20-30 Chinese people and another 20-30 consultants, engineers and who-knows-what. They kept interrupting during our presentations and some of the American consultants would basically yell at them and say they were being rude. You cannot make this stuff up. Luckily we dropped out after a month into the process when the umpteenth change in utility requirements made the needed improvements so expensive (think $30 million+) that we threw in the towel. They wanted the land for free, all utilities to the site boundary at their required capacities (which changed weekly at this point still) for free, and to pay no local or state taxes for 20 years. This was the dumbest ROI scenario we ever saw and it wasn’t hard to convince our elected officials to throw in the towel. In the end it wouldn’t have mattered because Ohio ended up getting cut a couple of months later because the State government wouldn’t pay up like Wisconsin did. It has made for some great story telling though, and it is the gift that keeps on giving for entertainment purposes. Thanks, Wisconsin!
Sunday, April 14, 2019
From A Better mount Pleasant:
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