Nov 15, 2018 3 min read

There’s no getting around it: Amazon’s HQ2 competition was a farce.

That became abundantly clear this week when the online retail and media giant announced it had chosen the two most powerful cities on the East Coast — New York City and suburban Washington, D.C. — to locate its second headquarters.

They beat out 18 other cities across the nation — including Pittsburgh — that submitted final proposals late last year that offered the mega-company lucrative tax breaks in order to land the coveted alternate headquarters that promised 50,000 good-paying jobs.

Amazon is reportedly receiving $2.4 billion in tax subsidies and investments from Virginia, New York and Tennessee, the latter of which will benefit from a new Operations Center of Excellence that will be built in Nashville.

Pennsylvania apparently offered $4.5 billion in performance-based grants in an attempt to land the headquarters in either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. That’s double what New York and Virginia offered, which makes it quite obvious that no other cities really had a chance to land HQ2. It seems that Amazon was poised to go either to the country’s financial capital or literal capital from the very beginning. In the end, they chose both.

But it’s still unknown what exactly Pittsburgh and Allegheny County offered to Amazon as part of its final competitive bid since both the city and county governments have declined multiple open records requests from various news organizations. The state’s Office of Open Records has ordered them to make the bids and incentives public, although Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald repeatedly rebuffed those efforts.

Now that HQ2 has gone elsewhere, Peduto and Fitzgerald said they will discuss parameters of the bid, while still withholding key details. That isn’t good enough. City and county officials should make the entire bid public so we know what properties were under consideration and who stood to benefit from the HQ2 project.

There has also been much debate over the past year about whether Amazon opening up a second headquarters in Pittsburgh would be good or bad for the region. There were concerns over whether the behemoth bringing an influx of new workers would drive home prices up and change the fabric of the city’s neighborhoods.

Those concerns, while valid, should now turn to civic pride that Pittsburgh was one of 20 cities to be considered for an international corporation’s headquarters. It gave the city and, more importantly, its people a national platform with an opportunity to showcase what this region has to offer.While it might not have been enough to land HQ2 — it’s obvious that Pittsburgh never had a legitimate chance — the competition put Western Pennsylvania in the national spotlight. A slick video called “Future. Forged. For All” included in the bid that featured the region’s blossoming tech industry was viewed nearly 200,000 times on YouTube. It was broadcast in various national media outlets, too, giving Pittsburghers a chance to show the rest of the world that we’re more than smoke and steel.

While this entire Amazon HQ2 process was slimy, it can only benefit Pittsburgh in the long-term. People who thought we were still the Steel City now know that we’re built on a foundation of elite medical care, education and technology.

That legacy is likely to last much longer than anything Amazon could have offered the region.

Observer-Reporter