After the Amazon implosion
Every component of New York’s leadership class — including politicians, activists, the business community and organized labor — should vow to never again fumble an opportunity like the proposed Amazon headquarters deal.
From conception to collapse, the episode exposed our city’s depressing inability to hold a spirited but rational public debate about how best to build commerce and community with billions of dollars and thousands of good jobs on the line.
There’s a great deal of public fingerpointing about who screwed up. Gov. Cuomo is blaming the Senate Democrats in general and Sen. Mike Gianaris in particular. Activists answer by calling Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio too willing to shower benefits on Amazon and too out of touch to perceive community objections in and around the proposed Long Island City development site.
Organized labor forgot the cardinal principle of solidarity and failed to speak with one voice. The Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York was in favor of the planned union construction jobs and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union supported the creation of an estimated 3,000 positions in security and building maintenance.
But Local 1500 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union wanted to organize workers at Amazon warehouses and in the Amazon-owned Whole Foods chain, and other unions were hungry to unionize tech jobs like coding that have long remained outside labor’s reach.
Activists, too, were in separate camps. Well-known organizers with make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change were steadfastly opposed, while tenant leaders from public housing complexes in the area were negotiating to help working-class families get job training and placement benefits.
And an embarrassing number of politicians failed to grasp — or deliberately dissembled about — longstanding incentive programs that offer tax rebates in return for job creation.
Serious people recognize that there’s more than enough blame to go around. Here are some suggestions about how the Amazon deal could have been sensibly debated and revised.
De Blasio and Cuomo should have lined up credible allies and had them in the room when the deal was unveiled. They should have proclaimed that the initial project proposal was only an opening bid, and that much of the deal would be revised after a 100-day period of discussion and debate.
Amazon, at the insistence of the city and state governments, should have hired local consultants with credibility and community roots. They should have designed and implemented an extensive outreach plan, knowing that noisy NIMBY opponents are part of every major project in New York.
The most innovative possible amendments to the plan should have been promoted immediately, and presented to the public by scholars and community leaders. My TV channel, NY1, was in the early stages of planning a televised town hall to facilitate discussion.
One generally ignored provision of the Amazon project plan would have created a special taxation zone — called a PILOT district — with the company making payments in lieu of taxes that would pay for upgrades. Sources tell me the state was in discussion with Amazon about drawing the boundaries of the PILOT zone to include the nearby Queensbridge Houses, creating the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the development.
Transit upgrades were on the table, as well as talk about placing job training and placement facilities directly on the grounds of public housing. All gone now.
We have to do better. New York has more big projects in the pipeline, such as the proposed $1 billion project to upgrade 43 acres at Belmont Park as a commercial center and home for the New York Islanders.
The Amazon debacle is a reminder that a core obligation of leadership is to refrain from petty battles and choose creative compromise in the name of building a better city for us all.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.