EDITORIAL: Chip monster is too much for Port Washington

In the big picture, the panoramic view, the prospect of a massive microchip producing facility coming to Port Washington has a shiny, positive look.

The federal government will love it as a sign of success in its effort, which includes lavish subsidies, to make the U.S. independent of foreign chip makers.

State officials will be delighted because it will help Wisconsin qualify for up to $500 million in federal funds after being designated as tech hub by the Biden administration.

Elected officials of the City of Port Washington, who would be asked to annex land for the facility, will be intrigued by the prospect of a very large increase in the tax base and accelerated growth of the city’s economy and population.

The close-up view is not as appealing. From some angles, it looks like a leviathan that could devour the character of the City and Town of Port Washington.

Judging from what landowners have been told in a real estate company’s blitz to sign up sellers, the anonymous purchasing entity’s project would be overwhelming. Covering roughly two square miles of what is now Town of Port Washington farmland and homesteads, it would not be merely a big manufacturing plant and offices, but a sprawling compound.

The stated goal of contracting to buy 1,000 to 1,200 acres of land suggests that the Port facility could be similar in size to the Intel microchip chip manufacturing campus now under construction on a 1,000-acre site in Ohio. When finished, that facility will have a workforce upwards of 3,000. Building it will reportedly require more than a thousand construction workers. Providing supporting infrastructure will be an enormous public project.

Unlike the all-rural Port Washington site, the land on which the Intel Ohio facility is located was designated as industrial park. Even so, fears are being voiced by residents about the impact on small-town living in communities near the site, including a projected 40% rise in the cost of housing, according to news reports.

The Intel extravaganza, at a cost of more than $20 billion, is the biggest private sector investment in the history of Ohio. Wisconsin has never seen anything like it, though it is on the way with Microsoft’s plan to build a $9 billion data center at Mount Pleasant.

Mount Pleasant may one day bask in the reflected glory of the tech phenomenon Microsoft, but it will always be associated with the Foxconn disaster.

Promises by the Tapei-based electronics company, echoed by Gov. Scott Walker and President Donald Trump, of 13,000 jobs and a $10 billion investment became justification for forcing Mount Prospect area residents to sell their land and homes or lose them through eminent domain. Vegetation was scraped off hundreds of acres of once verdant landscape for six-lane and four-lane highways to serve the development. Then it turned out the promises were nothing more than hyperbole that was closer to fraud than the truth. Few jobs and minimal investment materialized.

There is no reason at this time to think the process of bringing the microchip producing complex to Port Washington, if that happens, would resemble the Mount Pleasant fiasco. Still, Foxconn serves as a cautionary tale, illustrating that if anything goes wrong in such an enormous enterprise, the impact on its surroundings is magnified by its overwhelming size.

In acquiring land, the real estate company representing the chip maker has offered above-market prices that have been irresistible to a number of farmland owners. The offers have been less appealing to homeowners with smaller parcels. One who sought a better offer told of getting a snarky reply from the agent: “He said they would build a big berm around my land and plant trees that my wife could pick out.” The message was clear—sell or be forced to live in the midst of a manufacturing complex.

It is ironic that features residents admire about the Port Washington area—a lightly populated countryside and proximity to Lake Michigan—are what has attracted the tech company seeking enough space to build a village-sized industrial campus with a ready water supply.

Whether it’s in the city or the residential areas along the lakeshore north of Port or amid the fields and woodlots of the agricultural expanse in the town, living here strikes a comfortable balance of small-town ambience and aesthetics with development at an adequate pace to keep the area prosperous.

That will never be the same if the giant microchip operation lands here. Besides that long-term effect, the immediate impact would be jolting, starting with a construction project of epic proportions, including highway building—picture a four-lane Highway LL­­—to handle a crushing volume of traffic during construction and when the facility is in operation.

Other sites in the running for the project are in Indiana and Ohio. Port Washington will be fortunate if either one of them is the “winner.”