Businesses in New York are frightened that their legislators will sell them down the river, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Spooked by New York’s loss of Amazon’s Long Island City headquarters, those in the private sector have lost confidence in the effectiveness of government to support the business community.
Cuomo made these comments while speaking to civic leaders and businesspeople. He added that more companies who would have been ripe for economic development arrangements with New York may now opt out of them.
“It cost us 25,000 jobs, and it also cost us credibility,” said the governor to attendees of the Association for a Better New York. “I can’t tell you how many businesses that I’m trying to bring to New York now say to me, Am I going to get Amazoned? Are they going to do to me what they did to Amazon, where we had a full agreement, and an agreement signed, and then it became a political hot potato because some politicians thought they could score political points?”
Cuomo made a point to verbally savage Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made public her feeling that the $3 billion incentive package offered to Amazon — including $2.5 billion in tax relief from the city and state and a $500 million construction grant — would be better spent on schools and in-city transportation.
“‘We’re going to give Amazon $3 billion.’ Why would we give Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, $3 billion? We didn’t give Amazon anything,” Cuomo said. “It was a lie. It was just a lie. It was political, it was just political. You can’t reason with people who don’t want to reason. It was just knee-jerk politics, and ‘Amazon is rich’ and ‘We’re anti-corporate’ and ‘We’re anti–rich people.'”
Turning his attention to the Public Authorities Control Board, Cuomo referred to “the threat to use the state approval process, and politicize the state approval process, to stop Amazon. They’re just supposed to look at the numbers to make sure that that authority can pay for the debt. What they did is they said ‘We’re going to use that position to politically stop the project because we don’t like the project.’ That was a threat to violate the law.”
Clearly, Cuomo’s rage over the loss of Amazon’s HQ shows no signs of petering out. Back in February, he took aim at fellow Democrats, calling the internet retailer’s rejection the “greatest tragedy” he has seen since he’s been in government.
His colleagues wasted no time returning fire. Senate majority spokesman Michael Murphy put out a public statement calling it “unfortunate that Governor Cuomo is once again failing to accept any responsibility for this failed deal. The Governor should spend less time with baseless attacks and attempts to divide Democrats and more time fixing his flawed economic development process so we can move forward and help business and the community thrive.”
