Now that the carton dust has settled with Amazon landing in New York City and Arlington, Virginia in the Washington DC suburbs, there is a sigh of relief here that Edmonton’s bid didn’t go anywhere.
Released figures show New York is paying Amazon $1.525 billion in incentives and tax breaks. Based on the number of jobs, that breaks down to $48,000 for each one created. Converted to Canadian funds, that’s $63,500.
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For Virginia, the total is more than a half a billion dollar subsidy over 12 years.
“I hope it works out for New York. I hope it works out for Amazon,” Mayor Don Iveson said, chuckling.
He does not agree at all with what he calls the race to the bottom on tax breaks.
“The city of Edmonton can’t and shouldn’t compete using existing taxpayer dollars to advantage one company over all of the other companies who’ve been paying taxes for a long time.”
“There’s an important principle there that if all mayors could abide by that principle then we’d be having a merit-based competition rather than an incentive-based competition.
“I think if it was a fair fight on merits, we’d pull down more.”
Councillor Mike Nickel agrees.
“Look at those numbers. It kind of says the return on investment is very questionable when you have to give this degree of subsidy.”
Iveson said Edmonton’s approach is to promote quality of life, good education and an improving transportation system.
“A lot of the things that helped us land Improbable, for example, and Google Deep Mind, were things we would have scored well on with Amazon.
“Our ability to offer $40,000 to $50,000 a head recruitment bonus essentially to Amazon bringing them here, that was never really in the cards for us. We would never have had the capacity for it.”