Six months ago, Across the Divide: Next Steps for Foxconnconvened a panel to discuss initial questions about the massive manufacturing facility coming to Racine County. Since then, developments have happened at a breathtaking pace. The first $100 million in construction contracts have been announced, with most of that going to Wisconsin companies, and some are asking how political connections affected those awards.
That’s one of the questions that we sought to answer in a follow-up forum. We returned to Prairie School in Wind Point on May 8 to convene a reporter roundtable, titled Foxconn Forum: Your Questions, Our Answers, to discuss the latest Foxconn developments:
Moderators Mitch Teich of WUWM's Lake Effect and Journal Sentinel's Erin Richards were joined by:
- Journal Sentinel business reporter Rick Romell, who has been covering the Foxconn story since day one.
- WUWM environmental reporter Susan Bence, who has studied Foxconn’s potential water use and its future impact on air quality.
- Research director for the Wisconsin Policy Forum Jason Stein, who formerly worked as a state capitol reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and, before that, did the same job for the Wisconsin State Journal.
