New York city council members claim they were not consulted by mayor Bill DeBlasio and governor Andrew Cuomo in their efforts to establish a new Amazon headquarters in Queens.
Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents Long Island City, told Politico that he only found out about the deal Amazon struck with the city to open a new headquarters in his district through news reports.
“They said that because there were non-disclosure agreements and lot of details were still being worked out that they couldn’t talk about the deal,” Van Bramer said of conversations he had with City Hall officials after he inquired about the deal.
The city council typically exercises influence over development projects through the land use review process but in this case the state relied on whats known as a “general project plan” to avoid the council’s oversight.
“This is beyond top-down, I’m not even sure what to call this,” council member Jumaane Williams told Politico. “This was done with no stakeholders in the room at all.”
While DeBlasio and Cuomo have touted the roughly 25,000 jobs that Amazon claims will result from the headquarters opening, critics of the plan claim the generous tax breaks, which add up to roughly $60,000 in government revenue per new job created, outweigh the plan’s benefits.
“I think if the takeaway from the recent election in Queens, New York City and nationally is that we should actually step up corporate subsidies and billionaires getting billion-dollar bailouts — if that’s the takeaway, somebody’s not got their fingers on the pulse of Democrats, certainly, but people generally in this country,” Van Bramer said.