New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is working hard to convince Amazon to change its mind after it scrapped plans to build a second headquarters in New York City.
The Seattle-based tech giant had originally planned on splitting its second headquarters between Crystal City in Virginia’s Arlington County and Long Island City in New York’s Queens borough, but dropped the New York half after complaints from left-wing lawmakers.
Cuomo is now furiously lobbying Amazon to reconsider and has told Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives that he would personally guide the company through the process of re-establishing plans for a Queens-based headquarters, according to the New York Times.
An open letter, signed by multiple interested parties, is expected to appear in Friday’s issue of the Times. The letter will strongly urge Amazon to reconsider its decision to concentrate its entire second campus in Arlington and implore the company to build half of the headquarters in Long Island City.
In addition to local businesses, unions, and other community organizations, signatories to the letter are also expected to include Democratic New York Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Carolyn Maloney.
Amazon’s original decision to move to Long Island City faced backlash from some progressive activists and politicians. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., argued against the $1.5 billion in incentives aimed at luring the headquarters to New York. She said the money should instead be used on subways and affordable housing.
Others, including JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, argued that the headquarters would have created job growth and furthered the economy of the region.
“It wasn’t just the 25,000 jobs that Amazon was going to do. It was probably going to be about 100,000 jobs supporting it,” Dimon said at the National Governors Association Winter Meeting last weekend. “And they would have gone from low skill to high skilled to consultants to lawyers to restaurants to barbers and construction workers.”
As of yet, Amazon does not appear to be reconsidering. It is focusing its efforts on the 25,000-person office planned for Arlington and 5,000-employee operations center in Nashville, Tennessee.
