Pols: It's the Amazon bungle!
City Council looks to zap megadeal
The City Council is reviewing its legal options to challenge the epic deal to bring Amazon to Queens, as a growing number of Democrats voiced opposition Wednesday.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson (below) said he had “very significant problems” with the way fellow Democrats Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio crafted nearly $3 billion in taxpayerfunded giveaways to the e-commerce behemoth to lure one of its two new headquarters to Long Island City.
He also objected to plans that would exempt Amazon’s massive development from the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which would require signoffs from the local community board and other officials.
“I think something is fundamentally wrong when you are giving this much money away and public land away and it’s cloaked in secrecy,” he said during a City Hall press conference.
Asked about the potential of filing suit to block the development, Johnson said, “We are reviewing our options.”
Johnson also responded, “Hell, no!” when asked if Amazon should get the private helipad promised in the deal, adding that CEO Jeff Bezos “should take the E train or the 7 train to Court Square and get off.”
John Kaehny, of the government-watchdog group Reinvent Albany, said the council “has every reason to be extremely pissed about this, and for the governor to just come in and bigfoot them is just appalling.”
Kaehny also said the Democratic lawmakers who will take control of the state Senate in January “have a veto over this deal through the Public Authorities Control Board.”
The board’s unanimous approval is needed for Amazon to collect on up to $505 million in grant money promised by Cuomo — and the state Senate controls one of its three votes, he said.
Presumptive state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) wouldn’t take a position on the Amazon plan during an appearance on WBAI radio.
“On the one hand, it’s a huge opportunity, but there are major questions and concerns that deserve to be addressed,” she said.
But one of her top lieutenants — state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Asto-Astoria), whose district covers Long Island City — was among about 100 protesters who gathered near the future Amazon site with a bunch of boxes adorned withh the company’s smiling-arrow logo inverted into a frown.
“We’re here to say toto Amazon, take that welcome mat that was rolled out for you yesterday, put it back in the package it came in and send it back to Seattle where it belongs,” Gianaris said.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, “One of the wealthiest companies in history should not be receiving financial assistance from the taxpayers while too many New York families struggle to make ends meet.”
De Blasio ally and Working Families Party state director Bill Lipton also called Amazon “the poster child for the concentration of wealth and political power in our new Gilded Age.”
Opposition to the Amazon deal even united conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson and self-described Democratic socialist Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DQueens).
“I hate to admit it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a very good point,” Carlson told his viewers Tuesday night. “It’s hard to argue with the internal logic —the richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?”
Bezos has an estimated net worth of $132 billion, according to Forbes.
Meanwhile, an Amazon exec admitted that the tax breaks and grants offered by New York and Virginia weren’t a key factor in the decision to pick Long Island City and Arlington, as the homes of its two new East Coast headquarters. Jay Carney, a former press secretary for the nPresident Barack Obama, told CNBC Wednesday that both areas were “attractive places to beb for people when we want to recruit talent. That’s why we ended up there.”
JEFF Bezos must be planning to build his Amazon complex in Long Island City out of Lego bricks. How else to explain his $3.6 billion estimate to develop up to 8 million square feet of offices within 15 years, when it’s costing $3.2 billion just to erect a single modern skyscraper, One Vanderbilt, with a mere 1.7 million square feet?
If the figure cited in the “memorandum of understanding” among the state, city and Amazon isn’t meant as a joke, it means one thing: Amazon, having already muscled the pols for cushy takeover terms, intends to build on the super-cheap as well.
Be afraid, be very afraid, of what Amazon might plunk down on the Long Island City waterfront.
How its “campus” for up to 25,000 workers will look, and what it will offer its neighbors, should be as big an issue for Queens residents and all New Yorkers as the debate over tax breaks and a heliport for Jeff Bezos.
Bigger, in fact — because while Amazon’s land grab appears to be a done deal, what will pop up on those sites is anything but.
Nobody expects Amazon to give us, say, a new South Street Seaport. It’s going to build an office complex. But there are warm-and-fuzzy office complexes that draw in their neighbors with stores, restaurants and other attractions, such as the new World Trade Center and Hudson Yards — and fortress-like ones with little to lure outsiders.
When did you last stroll for fun through Metrotech, or through suburban “corporate parks” in Westchester and Connecticut?
Carl Weisbrod, the former city-planning commissioner who backed the public-friendly Domino Sugar site development in Williamsburg, argued that “Amazon, like any major company, is entitled to having security at its site. But this must be balanced against public ability to access the waterfront and pass through the office complex unimpeded.”
Amazon’s sprawling headquarters in downtown Seattle boasts open streets, popular restaurants and art installations. But the Long Island City site won’t be a “second headquarters,” as the company first claimed it wanted, but only half of one — a satellite at best and a back office at worst.
Will Amazon try to close off a street that runs through the site to create a “superblock,” like at the old World Trade Center? Will it bring in a big supermarket — maybe one of its Whole Foods stores — that might help the neighborhood but could also threaten small businesses like the Meera Deli two blocks away?
All we know is that Amazon’s yet-to-be-disclosed plan is to be “generally consistent” with the Long Island City Waterfront Design Guidelines — non-binding recommendations drawn up in 2016 by the Department of City Planning (a copy of which the agency didn’t even have on hand when the deal was announced Tuesday; the city’s Economic Development Corporation managed to dig one up later).
The guidelines suggest peoplefriendly amenities, such as stores and river views, and a “robust mix of housing, retail and productive manufacturing uses.”
But even that flimsy outline has already been thrown into the East River — there’s no housing or retail in the mix.
The guidelines lack the legal clout of city zoning, which in any event Gov. Cuomo overrode for the deal: State control means no input from the City Council or community boards — which are obstructive at times but helpful in improving proposed projects at others.
Having steamrolled Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio in wresting sweetheart terms for the site, Bezos might regard “guidelines” for niceties such as “esplanade and park experiences” and trees as mere speed bumps on the way to an Amazon citadel.
Why should Cuomo care? He’s positioned himself as a bareknuckles, Robert Moses-like builder “with jagged edges and little regard for rules, especially if they are standing in the way of the results he wants,” as a recent New York Times profile put it.
Don’t count on Amazon’s good will. Its real-estate record is ornery at best. It bamboozled 300 US cities into offering the moon with the promise of a full-fledged “second headquarters.”
Bezos also snookered savvy developer Douglas Durst in 2014 when they were negotiating a lease on Sixth Avenue. Amazon went behind his back to make a deal with a different landlord — violating an agreement that it could not do so as long as the company was talking to Durst. Durst filed a $25 million lawsuit against Amazon for fraud that’s yet to be resolved.
New Yorkers can’t afford that kind of surprise. Cuomo and de Blasio must lay down the law to Amazon now — lest Long Island City end up with cheap, boxy buildings and a helipad for just one passenger.