Scrapping HQ2 in Queens Spares Amazon Return Trip to 3rd Hostile Hearing
Though debate rages in New York over the wisdom of the local opposition that provoked Amazon to pull the plug on Long Island City, Queens (see 1902140054), City Council leaders who hammered the deal for three months refused to walk back the two confrontational oversight hearings they held in December and January that no doubt contributed to Amazon's decision to withdraw.
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Scrapping the HQ2 on the Queens waterfront now spares Amazon executives the ordeal of a third trip to City Hall for a scheduled Feb. 27 hearing, where they were certain to face still more tough questioning about the deal's land-use implications. In all the roughly seven hours of testimony over the two hearings, not a single council member came to Amazon's defense.
For tech companies “willing to engage with New Yorkers and work through challenging issues, New York City is the world’s best place to do business,” tweeted Council Speaker Corey Johnson, clearing insinuating that Amazon wasn't one of them. Opponents in the council “challenged this deal from the beginning because Amazon has a track record of not treating its workers right and is being horribly anti-union,” Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, D-Queens told Bloomberg News. “We exposed them during this process over the last few months,” said Van Bramer, whose District 26 is where HQ2 would have been. Amazon's appearances before the council were "dreadfully bad" because the company gave evasive answers to most questions, he said.
It was Johnson who got Amazon at the Jan. 30 hearing to say it wouldn't commit to a policy of “neutrality” if its Long Island City employees sought to unionize. Johnson also said he called the Feb. 27 hearing to confront Amazon and city economic development executives with allegations that the HQ2 memorandum of understanding improperly bypassed the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) and the council’s oversight of the program.
New York's city charter established ULURP as a “standardized procedure whereby applications affecting the land use of the city would be publicly reviewed,” says the program’s website. The charter requires the council to do mandatory review of any applications affecting zoning map revisions and other zoning changes, but council review is optional for other scenarios, including the disposition of existing commercial or residential property or site selection for new building projects.
For a “land-use project” of HQ2's size, the council “is typically deeply involved in the negotiations and has a real seat at the table,” Johnson told the Dec. 12 oversight hearing. “That, of course, did not happen in this case.” The charter “specifically tasked” the council with “land-use authority,” he said.
ULURP was “designed so communities could figure out what’s needed to accommodate the kinds of changes that development can bring, be it new schools, transit upgrades or infrastructure improvements,” said Johnson. Communities use the ULURP process to “advocate for changes” because they know best “what adding, say, 25,000 workers or a noisy helipad means to the area,” he said. He accused Amazon of conspiring with city economic development officials to “subvert the public-review process.”