Foxconn project officials announce plans for three more bid packages

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It’s go time.

That’s the message construction officials overseeing Foxconn Technology Group’s massive factory project in Racine County delivered to a crowd of contractors on Wednesday.

After companies hurried to clear land at the company’s site in the village of Mount Pleasant last year – work that was followed by months of uncertainty about Foxconn’s plans – the project is now expected to move ahead at an even faster pace.

The lead contractor on the project, Gilbane, and its project partner, Exyte, announced during an information session in Sturtevant on Wednesday that they would soon begin putting out various bid packages calling for the construction of a power substation and a fabrication building at the Foxconn site. The releases will come in rapid-fire succession over the next four to eight weeks, said Adam Jelen, senior vice president of Gilbane’s central and Midwest divisions.

“This is going to be a little different cadence than before,” Jelen said. “Last year, by-design, it was a consistent, disciplined process for how to get engaged. Now it’s go time.”

The announcement came after Foxconn officials said last week that five companies had won a combined $34 million worth of work to build roadways, install utilities and set up temporary electrical infrastructure at the site. That marked the project’s first big step forward in months.

Last spring, the company began releasing contracts to prepare the factory site for development. That groundwork involved moving 4 million cubic yards of soil and the construction of the site’s first structure, a multipurpose building.

On Wednesday, officials spoke of three more big contracts that Gilbane plans to release in bite-sized pieces over the coming week, Jelen said.

“You’re going to see things come out in a rapid pace,” he said.

Among the new projects, the first will have contractors build a power substation to supply the new plant with electricity. A number of trades will be involved in this job, including materials testing, concrete work, metals work and landscaping. Jelen said construction officials plan to release bids for the substation in the next 10 days or so.

The next project will involve foundation and underground work to support a colossal building to house Foxconn’s fabrication, design and logistics operations. The first contracts bid out for the new structure, which is expected to dwarf the current multipurpose building, will call for excavation, foundation and waterproofing work and testing.

Still later this year, Foxconn officials plan to bid out contracts calling for the installation of systems to supply the factory with water, chemicals and gas used to make LCD screens. Among other things, contractors will be called on to build a so-called Zero Liquid Discharge system, which would be used to recycle the millions of gallons of water a day that the tech giant is expected to pull from Lake Michigan. Other projects will call for the construction of specialty gas systems and a bulk gas yard and nitrogen plant.

Jelen said Gilbane and Exyte may tap national or global contractors and suppliers to complete some of the more complex jobs. These new bids are a departure from the grading, excavation and site work that was bid out last year and, for that reason, are expected to elicit responses from new combinations of contractors and suppliers.

Brad Angell, business development manager at the Milwaukee-based MSI Marking Services, said he and his fellow officials hadn’t seen many opportunities for their company in the bid releases last year. This new batch should be different, he said.

MSI is a pipe-labeling contractor that could be employed to make sure the thousands of pipes that will eventually be installed in Foxconn’s factory are marked precisely.

“I’ll be here every week,” Angell said. “Once a bid comes out, more than likely we’ll have an opportunity to do some work on it.”

Even as new bids are let out, preparation work won’t cease entirely at the Foxconn campus. Jelen said the site still needs to be made ready for potential future developments.

This latest round of bid releases comes as a sign that Foxconn continues to move forward with its factory project despite months of uncertainty over the company’s plans. In late January, two news reports cast doubt on Foxconn’s intentions.

A company executive told Reuters that, despite the company’s assurances, the Racine County campus wouldn’t have a manufacturing plant after all. A day later, the business publication Nikkei Asian Review reported Foxconn was putting its construction plans on hold in response to market conditions and its negotiations with the new Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers.

Ultimately, Foxconn said it would put up a Generation 6 manufacturing facility – a smaller version of the Generation 10 LCD plant the company had initially planned to build – and would employ 1,500 manufacturing workers at the site by 2020.

Wednesday’s information session also marked the start of Foxconn’s first big development push under Gov. Tony Evers, who took office in January. Sam Rikkers, a former Obama Administration official, recently joined the Wisconsin Department of Administration as its strategic economic initiatives director, and will now oversee the Foxconn project.

He joined the agency about three weeks ago, as state officials and Foxconn executives were meeting to discuss the project. One Wednesday, he found himself before a crowd of more than 100 contractors.

“This is going to be a fast moving fast-moving project,” Rikkers said. “Information and opportunities are going to be coming at us faster than we probably were used to last year.” Follow @natebeck9