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Microsoft forgoes $5 million; Mount Pleasant to reinvest funds
From JSOnline:
Ricardo Torres
Microsoft is telling the Village of Mount Pleasant to keep a $5 million development incentive.
The company and the village made the announcement on Sept. 28, saying the funds would be "redirected" back to the Mount Pleasant and the Racine Economic Development Corp.
The village plans to keep $4.9 million the redevelopment agency plans to receive $100,000 for "county-wide economic development initiatives."
Mount Pleasant officials plant to use use this money to keep tax bills stable by reducing the tax levy in 2027 while maintaining village services and cover capital project costs like rebuilding roads or buying police and fire vehicles.
“Taxpayers will benefit immediately, and will continue to benefit for years to come, because of the data centers Microsoft is building,” Mount Pleasant village president David DeGroot said in a statement. “This directly supports our residents at tax time, which has always been the Village Board’s ultimate goal as it seeks balanced growth.”
Mount Pleasant's tax levy in the 2026 adopted budget is $26,498,230.
Jenny Trick, executive director of the redevelopment agency, said the $100,000 "will expand our capacity to drive economic growth and create new opportunities throughout Racine County."
Microsoft has already completed its first hyper-scale data center in the village and a second is currently under construction.
"When we announced that we would build a datacenter campus in the Village of Mount Pleasant in 2023, we made it clear that the community should benefit from our presence," Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, said in a statement. "We will continue to invest in delivering on that promise with economic opportunity, local careers, tax revenue, and more."
According to the development agreement approved in 2023, Microsoft is eligible for up to $5 million as a "development incentive" if the company has created a certain level of property value.
The $5 million incentive comes from tax incremental district number 5, which was set up in 2017 to accommodate the Foxconn Technology Group development before Microsoft bought the site originally assembled for Foxconn.
In July, Microsoft reported a quarterly earnings profit of more than $35.8 billion. For all of 2025, Microsoft had a profit of $101 billion.
Mount Pleasant has approved for up to 15 data centers to be built in the village by Microsoft. The company has more than 550 workers at its facility in the village.
Microsoft using transparency, money to buy good will
Around the country, data centers have received bipartisan pushback from residents opposed to these developments coming to their communities.
Microsoft has not been immune to the outrage from local residents and last October the company pulled its plans for a data center in Caledonia, also in Racine County.
Microsoft has tried several different strategies to ease the local criticism of data centers including ending its use of non-disclosure agreements with local municipalities.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel back in January, Smith said the company recognizes the concerns people have for these developments.
“I think we’re at a cultural pivot point because to bring people along, to get comfortable being more transparent, to be comfortable having conversations about questions to which we don’t yet know the answer – requires a different approach,” Smith said. “As an industry, we need a cultural change to raise the bar on ourselves and to be more comfortable being transparent.”
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