“During the process it became clear to us that the overriding criteria was going to be the ability to find and attract talent,” Jay Carney, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in an interview immediately after the company announced its plans for New York and Virginia.
Was any of this information public?
Most of it — but the company got the city and state to pull it all together.
New York’s response includes at least 140 footnotes documenting data sources that show how much information was publicly available. Some of it was very basic. New York had to detail, for example, that the state government has a bicameral legislature — the Senate and Assembly — whose officials are elected to two-year terms, and that 70,000 4-year-olds attend the city’s free, full-day pre-K programs. And it laid out the zoning designations for dozens of individual parcels.
While that information is public, it is spread across dozens of sources, and can be time-consuming to compile. The New York response has tables from federal census reports, published studies, city databases and news articles.
Amazon also asked cities to provide the costs of a “gallon of 2% milk, loaf of whole wheat bread, and an avocado” at a local Whole Foods, the organic grocer that Amazon owns.
As Mr. Parilla said, “It’s like why do the work when somebody else can do it?”
How is that information valuable?
Having that information, compiled in one place, can let Amazon move quickly in the future, Mr. Florida said. The company can go back to cities and say, “We didn’t put HQ2 in your neighborhood but we have this really good idea for an R&D hub,” Mr. Florida said. “You have this great site here, and you told us what incentives you would have,” and push them to act.
Mr. Sedo, the Amazon spokesman, said the company had already used information gleaned from the first round as it looks to future growth. For example, Amazon learned about a program in New Orleans that lets companies inform classes taught at community colleges, which made Amazon think it could be a good place to build a fulfillment center with robotics that require specialized skills to maintain and operate. He said real estate information, while valuable, can change quickly as cities develop.
“You now have this database that you can go back to,” Mr. Parilla said. “You have so much more information.”
J. David Goodman contributed reporting.
from Just News Update https://ift.tt/2rvlUzs
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