Amazon wanted even greater subsidies to come to Long Island City but the city and state turned them down, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.
“Amazon wanted a whole host of deeper types of subsidies and concessions,” de Blasio said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We wouldn’t give it to them. What we got in the end of was a 9-to-1 ratio in the amount of revenue we are going to get back for any kind of incentives that they got.”
The mayor didn’t say what more Amazon requested that it didn’t get.
He claimed the $2.5 billion in tax breaks awarded the retail giant are filled with “automatic incentives” that are available to “any company that comes into the state” or plans to “build in the outer boroughs” like Queens.
The mayor also claimed New York “drove a hard bargain” to get what he estimates will be anywhere between 25,000 and 40,000 permanent jobs.
“We’re getting a number of jobs that are almost unimaginable for a single transaction,” he said. “And we made it clear to Amazon those jobs need to go to everyday New Yorkers.”
“Other states … offered vast incentive packages, but they still ended up coming to New York City because we said, ‘Look, this is what you got if you come to New York City,’” added the mayor.
“’We are going to ask you to do things. We need you to build public space for everyone in that community. We need you to give us space for a school. We need new training programs for folks who live in public housing’ … Amazon understood that if you come to New York City, you have to live with our values. And in the end, what we are going to see is not only a vast number of jobs — it is by far the biggest number of new jobs the city has ever seen.”