A First Look At Everything New York Will Give Amazon To Come To Queens
For everyone wondering when we would find out how much boodle Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio offered to Amazon in exchange for coming to Long Island City, the answer is now: As part of its official announcement designating New York City and Arlington, Virginia as the new dual homes of the company’s second headquarters (plus Nashville, which will be getting an “Operations Center of Excellence” as a consolation prize), Amazon has released its full memorandum of understanding [MOU] laying out exactly how much money New York taxpayers will be spending on the deal.
The MOU has a lot of pieces and almost certainly some key details hidden in the fine print, but here are the initial takeaways:
The big-ticket item is up to $1.2 billion in “Excelsior tax credits” under the state’s Excelsior jobs incentive program. These are flat-out subsidies underwriting employee salaries: For every dollar spent on wages, the state will kick back 6.85 cents to the employer — the rough equivalent of taking Amazon workers’ state income tax checks and signing them back over to the company. If Amazon follows through on its pledge to bring 25,000 jobs to New York in the next ten years, it can cash in the full $1.2 billion; if less than that, the credits will be pro-rated.
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Amazon will be provided with a company helipad on the site. This is hardly the most important perk Jeff Bezos is getting out of the deal, but it gets a whole line item of its own in the MOU, so clearly somebody cared about it a whole lot.
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