What Amazon Was Offered: Helipads, Zoo Tickets: NY, VA, MD, NJ, Phila, Pgh, Atl, Dallas
What cities offered Amazon: helipads, zoo tickets, and a street named Alexa. Now that the home for its next headquarters has been chosen, losing cities are revealing how they tried to sweeten the deal. The Guardian, Nov. 15. 2018.
Philadelphia is in the Goldilocks zone for Amazon – it possesses all of the key ingredients we looked for to support our long-term growth,” said Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon and richest man in the history of the world.
At least, that’s what the city of Philadelphia was hoping Bezos would say when officials included a draft press release announcing the city’s hypothetical victory in their bid to become the site of Amazon’s second headquarters.
Following Tuesday’s announcement of the winners in Amazon’s competition, runner-up cities have begun revealing the details of their losing bids, many of which were kept secret from the very people whose tax dollars were being offered up as incentives to the $800bn company. And the details of those proposals make Philadelphia’s invocation of a tale about an entitled child who breaks into a family’s home, eats their food, messes around with their belongings, and then gets away scot-free come off as a tad on the nose.
Here are some highlights from the cornucopia of giveaways that Bezos decided were not “just right” for them.
Cash money. Between New York, Virginia and Nashville – the three sites where Amazon will build two new corporate campuses and a distribution hub – Amazon will receive nearly $3.5bn in public subsidies. But it could have had even more. Maryland was prepared to cough up $8.5bn, while New Jersey was willing to go to $7bn.
Now that they’ve lost, some localities are finally coming clean about what they’d put on the table. Pennsylvania, which had two different cities in the running, was prepared to offer the company $4.6bn in “financial assistance”, the vast majority of it through a “performance-based grant program” by which the commonwealth would collect income taxes from Amazon employees, and then give the money to Amazon – for 25 years.
Philadelphia was promising to add its own $1.1bn to the pot, promising that local taxes collected from Amazon for 20 years would be returned to the company as well. Pittsburgh’s mayor has not yet revealed what his city was promising.
Atlanta and Dallas have now revealed their losing hands as well: $2bn and $1.1bn in incentives, respectively...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/amazon-next-headquarters-losing-city-bids-what-offered
Philly dodged a ‘prosperity bomb’ when Amazon didn’t pick us. Be very grateful.|Will Bunch, The Inquirer, Nov. 14, 2018.
It almost seems silly to ask if too much prosperity is a good thing. But did you really want to be standing underneath a "prosperity bomb"? That's the evocative phrase that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat used to describe the fallout from astronomical housing costs, congestion, and income inequality that come after raining down tens of thousands of six-figure tech jobs on one city, as has happened in Westneat's hometown in the early 21st century.
http://www2.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/amazon-hq2-philadelphia-pitch-virginia-new-york-20181114.html
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