Mount Pleasant taxpayers still paying millions for Foxconn and how the Senate primary broke for Barnes

Taxpayers in Mount Pleasant have spent nearly $167 million for Foxconn-related vendors including one politically tied consultant who is paid $28K per month.

• The money has been used to pay for attorneys, a public relations firm, real estate consultants and a project manager who is making $28,000 a month, according to records obtained by the Journal Sentinel. Even though little is apparently taking place at the site, the costs to the small residential and farming village in Racine County — virtually unknown until Foxconn — continue to mount.

• Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which tracks corporate subsidies and incentives offered by state and local governments, said when deals like Foxconn don't materialize it's best for a community to cut its losses to minimize collateral damage. "It's hard to point to a lot of comparables because this degree of shenanigans has not gone on elsewhere," LeRoy said of the Foxconn project.

• Despite the international attention the Foxconn project was getting, the village hired Claude Lois to manage the project in 2017 without doing a national search. Lois is an employee of Milwaukee-based engineering firm Kapur & Associates, which the village pays for his time. He's the only Kapur employee to work on the project and is assigned to it full time. Last year, the village board extended the contract with Kapur for Lois's work by two years and his pay was upped to $175 per hour. That amount is set to increase Aug. 21 to $200 per hour. Lois, who served as the mayor of Burlington for four terms before deciding not to run again in 2008, was friendly with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and then-Governor Scott Walker.

• "While activities at Foxconn stalled, property had all been purchased and public meetings had been suspended — Claude's invoices remained the same," said village watchdog Kelly Gallaher, who operates the group A Better Mount Pleasant. "There is no detail which accounts how he spends his time or what he does. No one knows."

'It happened very quickly': The inside story of how the Wisconsin Senate primary broke for Mandela Barnes

• Nobody could have expected a finish like this. A yearlong U.S. Senate Democratic primary campaign in Wisconsin headed into the home stretch. Candidates courting voters and spending millions. Ballots printed and tens of thousands of them already cast. And then, a little more than 72 hours of shock and awe. This week's sudden exits of Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry and Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson all but handed the race to Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

• An internal Lasry poll from June showed him down 3 percentage points. Three other polls taken by an outside Democratic group showed Barnes and Lasry in a dead heat. But all that changed early last week. That's when the Lasry campaign did a quick poll to see how the candidates were lining up as his team plotted its strategy and TV buys for the final weeks of the race. Lasry had put a total of $15 million into the race from his own pocket. The results took Lasry's team by surprise. He was down double digits. Three more pollsters from three different groups then conducted additional polls last week. They all told the same story. Lasry was in trouble.

• The Democratic candidate was informed late last week of the poll numbers, and he was given several options: (1) he could go negative and attack Barnes in the final weeks; (2) he could continue airing his positive TV spots and run through the tape for a second-place finish; or (3) he could drop out. In an interview, Lasry said, "We've been looking over the data the last few weeks, just wanting to make sure everything was clear and exhausting all options and ensuring if there was a path forward or not. And if there's no path to winning, there's no sense in staying in.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mount Pleasant taxpayers still paying millions for Foxconn s