Six years ago today, Valentine’s Day, Amazon broke up with New York City, abandoning a planned headquarters on the Long Island City waterfront in Queens that would have brought tens of thousands of jobs. Today, we mark that heartbreak as to what should have been and warn politicians to learn the bitter lessons that made the deal collapse.
For the sixth anniversary of a wedding, the gift to couples was once iron, symbolizing strength. Or the sixth anniversary can also bring candy or sugar. Amazon’s promise of jobs was ironclad in writing, and how sweet it would have been.
The writing is a signed memorandum of understanding dated Nov. 12, 2018 and announced publicly the next day by the governor and mayor at the time, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, who put aside their sniping to act as one.
We still have a copy of the document which is no longer on the website of the city Economic Development Corp. (it should be restored as a matter of public record). The MOU says that in exchange for tax breaks Amazon was responsible for the “creation of 25,000 new jobs with an average wage of over $150,000 annually within 10 years of the date hereof, with a planned expansion …. that is expected to result in the creation of up to 40,000 new jobs within 15 years of the date hereof.”
On Attachment C, the Incentive Proposal, on pages 3 and 4 there is a chart of the jobs required to be created each year, starting with 700 in 2019 and reaching 25,000 in 2028 (and 40,000 in 2033). The 2025 figure is 17,900 of these high-paying jobs. Instead there are zero.
The MOU is addressed to Holly Sullivan, vice president of worldwide economic development for Amazon. It is signed by Howard Zemsky, CEO of the state Urban Development Corp.; Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for housing and economic development; James Patchett, CEO of NYC EDC; Rob Mujica, state budget director and Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy and community engagement.
The public officials have all moved on, as have their bosses, Cuomo and de Blasio. However, the two Amazon execs, Sullivan and Huseman, hold the same jobs. If Amazon hadn’t backed out three months later, on Valentine’s Day, Sullivan and Huseman would have 18,000 colleagues working in Queens.
There was a gang up against the deal stoked by pols like freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even though the Amazon site wasn’t in her district. Joining AOC were the local state senator and councilman, Mike Gianaris and Jimmy Van Bramer, and Council Speaker Corey Johnson. The quartet’s hostility persuaded Amazon to quit, making the jobs vanish.
