San Antonio pulls plug on its Amazon bid
SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio and Bexar County officials are bowing out of the competition for Amazon’s proposed $5 billion second headquarters, reversing course from their initial plans to put together a competitive bid, officials said.
“Blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg wrote in a joint letter sent Wednesday to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The Seattle e-commerce giant invited cities last month to bid on the location of its second headquarters, HQ2, promising 50,000 new jobs that pay an average of more than $100,000 a year. The deadline is Oct. 19.
“We’ve long been impressed by Amazon and its bold view of the future,” Nirenberg and Wolff said in the letter. “Given this, it’s hard to imagine that a forward-thinking company like Amazon hasn’t already selected its preferred location. And if that’s the case, then this public
process is, intentionally or not, creating a bidding war amongst states and cities.”
The decision not to bid changes course from last month when a team consisting of the city, the county and the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation said it was “engaged and ready to pursue this opportunity,” according to a statement released at the time by Erica Hurtak, spokeswoman for the foundation.
Hurtak said Wednesday that the city reviewed the bidding criteria and decided that it didn’t have a chance at winning the bid.
“As aspirational as we are about our community’s potential, we simply wouldn’t be highly competitive from a real estate and incentives perspective,” she said in a statement.
The news came one day after Nirenberg said the city needs a major international airport with nonstop flights to make the city “a competitive, long-term air option.”
But the San Antonio airport’s lack of nonstop flights wouldn’t have been as big a factor in Amazon’s decision as the city’s workforce, said Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert.
“The big one I think we need to overcome more than the airport is the pipeline of labor,” Calvert said in an interview Wednesday. “Our labor force is really our Achilles’ heel.”
Still, Calvert called the city and county decision not to pursue the Amazon campus “a big mistake.” He learned of the news from a reporter.
“It’s almost like we’re trying to be second-tier,” Calvert said. “We’re not even the little engine that could. We couldn’t even be the Jamaican bobsled team. To be honest, we’re fourthtier.”
Earlier Wednesday, U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to consider Texas for the second headquarters, saying San Antonio and other Texas cities are fast becoming “global hubs for technology, data-driven business, and talent.”