When Amazon announced it would select the site for its $5 billion “HQ2” via a public bid process, cities and regions across North America sent the tech giant 238 bids.

Cities and regions in New York state submitted four proposals in total — a downstate bid from New York City and Westchester County, an upstate bid from the greater Albany area, a joint bid from Buffalo and Rochester and a central New York bid from the Syracuse and the Mohawk Valley region.

None of the individual upstate cities with bids fulfill Amazon’s preferred population quota of 1 million residents, which has prompted the teams behind the bids to find loopholes.

“We formed a collaborative group that includes the seven counties of the Mohawk Valley, so that we have over 1 million people in terms of population,” said Andrew Fish, senior vice president of business development for Centerstate Corporation for Economic Opportunity.

Centerstate’s CEO is spearheading the pitch for the Syracuse and Mohawk Valley area.

Tom Kucharski, the CEO of Invest Buffalo Niagara, the firm handling the Buffalo-Rochester pitch, took a similar approach.

“We teamed together realizing that from a population standpoint, Buffalo and Rochester are just over the population threshold that Amazon laid out,” Kucharski said. “Since we are closer than most folks realize and closer than a lot of other twin-city approaches throughout the country, we decided to come together and split our assets.”

Both proposals tout their respective area’s low cost of operation, affordable housing market, ability to accommodate Amazon’s initial facility requirement of 500,000 square feet and proximity to top-tier institutions from which Amazon is already recruiting. This includes the Rochester Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Syracuse University.

The project is slated to create more than 50,000 jobs directly, as well as thousands of other jobs in the city through Amazon’s direct investment. Amazon said it created more than 40,000 jobs directly and another 53,000 indirectly in the Seattle metropolitan area, where its current headquarters are based.

Both projects acknowledge that landing HQ2 would be a boon for their respective communities.

Fish said a goal of the CNY proposal is to combat poverty in the area.

“We are asking them to partner with us in a way that shows the rest of the world how to do inclusive economic growth by partnering with a community and organizations and creating on-ramps for people who have traditionally been left behind,” Fish said, regarding how the project could alleviate local income inequality.

Fish said it could get traditionally underrepresented populations the training and skills necessary for entry-level jobs.

Kucharski said that even advancing to the second round of consideration would cause other companies to look at Buffalo and Rochester for their own headquarters.

“It would also send a message to other companies that ‘If it’s good enough for Amazon, then we ought to check out Buffalo and Rochester,’” Kucharski said.

Fish also said he believes Syracuse’s drone corridor could be a major selling point to Amazon, especially because the company has shown an interest in getting into unmanned air delivery. There is no place in the country that has drone corridors with sensors to test Amazon Prime air delivery, he added.

Amazon will release their final site selection in 2018.

Published on October 25, 2017 at 11:21 pm

Contact Ryan: rarozenb@syr.edu