No prizes for cities cut from Amazon list
SAN FRANCISCO — There were 218 communities whose proposals did not reach the second round in Amazon’s well-publicized search for its second headquarters. For those ambitious but unlucky folks, there were no “thanks for entering” gift baskets or any consolation prizes.
Tom Hall, town manager of Scarborough, Maine, had just returned from a meeting about the clam harvest when he heard the bad news from a reporter. He took it philosophically. The town’s proposal to convert a 500-acre harness racing track in the center of Scarborough was, he knew, “the longest of long shots.”
In Oklahoma, there were more regrets. “I’m certainly disappointed,” said Scott Phillips, who ran a development team called Day 1 that promoted a proposal to build an entirely new 50-square-mile city for Amazon between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, equidistant from each.
“Amazon missed an opportunity to include more out-of-the-box thinking in their list of finalists from proposals like ours,” he added.
For the cities that were not one of Amazon’s 20 finalists, that D-word kept coming up.
Jim Watson, mayor of Ottawa, said he was “disappointed” twice in a brief interview, adding that the whole process was “great publicity” for Amazon.
“This news is certainly disappointing,” the team that promoted Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., said in a statement.
“Very disappointed,” said the Bay Area Council, which had submitted a bid on behalf of San Francisco and four neighboring cities.
Amazon’s obsessive desire to please its customers has created a fearsome retail juggernaut and made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. This sense of disappointment in the company, however transient it may prove, is something new.
Yet it was perhaps inevitable after the way Amazon turned its search for a second headquarters, which it announced in a blaze of publicity in September, into such a beauty contest.
Even with unemployment low, the stock market booming and the economy chugging along, the prospect of landing as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs from Amazon aroused the excitement of politicians everywhere.
“When they rolled this idea out, the narrow description they used really only defined about 30 cities,” said Phillips of Day 1, referring to how Amazon had said it was looking for a metropolitan area in North America with at least 1 million people, among other criteria. “Maybe they truly thought only 30 cities would apply. The fact that 238 did probably caught them off-guard.”
Scarborough, for instance, was probably not on Amazon’s radar. It is on the Northeast coast, just south of Portland, and has a population of about 20,000. The simplicity of the application process, which involved answering nine questions, providing data and touting the city, “encouraged us and several hundred others who did not have a viable chance to make the strongest possible argument why it should be us,” said Hall, the town manager. “There’s value in thinking and articulating that.”
Another factor at play: the sense that Amazon was determined to achieve dominance, so why not join up?
Hall said he had received “no word whatsoever” from Amazon about the fate of his application. An Amazon spokesman said, “All the cities received direct communication from Amazon, including many personal phone calls.” (Late Thursday, the Scarborough team finally received an email from the company.)
Many of the other also-rans did not want to talk.