David Michael Miller
Madison has a lot to offer Amazon. But Amazon won’t take it and Madison shouldn’t have bothered.
The Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) has joined over 200 other regions across the country to compete for Amazon’s new second headquarters. It’s an unseemly affair where communities are being asked to jump for the treat. Amazon published a list of requirements that communities had to meet to gain its favor.
Madison didn’t even meet the basics, but that didn’t stop local boosters from taking a shot at it anyway. Amazon says it wants to locate in a diverse metro area of at least one million people with a major airport and access to good mass transit. The Madison region has lots of good people, but not a million of them and while we welcome diversity, we are not at all diverse compared with major metro areas around the country. Our mass transit system would be stronger if we had, I don’t know, say high speed rail to Milwaukee and Chicago. And our quiet little airport is lovely, but also quiet and little.
The New York Times did an analysis of metro areas that might make the cut and Madison didn’t even register because of the factors just mentioned. For what it’s worth, the Times’ analysis pointed to Denver as the likely ultimate winner.
If they’re right, Denver may live to regret its luck. As Times contributor and author Timothy Egan pointed out, the winning community should be careful about what it wished for. Egan lives in Seattle, home of the mother ship, and he has seen Amazon drive up traffic and home prices and transform his city in ways that many residents didn’t want. People like teachers, firefighters and cops have been all but driven from the city.
With nearly full employment here, Dane County is doing just fine, thank you very much. Do we really want to be blessed by Amazon and changed forever? Do we really want to be Seattle or Austin or the San Francisco Bay area? I like to visit those places but I wouldn’t want to live there. And thanks to their growth rates, I couldn’t afford to if I did. Regardless of our chances for being picked, did anybody ask the people who actually live here if they even want Amazon in their backyards? Why is it assumed that more is always better?
These kinds of deals are driven by developers and other businesses that want to make money on growth, but, in truth, they are also pushed by well-meaning community leaders who just believe that a city or a region has to grow in order to thrive.
And, of course, good jobs — if not fast growth — are important to everyone so having an economic development strategy makes sense. The problem is that entering these bidding wars is not a strategy at all. Instead, it’s like buying lottery tickets in lieu of saving for retirement. It’s not a plan, but a prayer.
To make matters worse, Amazon has made it clear that while it may be one of the biggest, richest companies on the face of the earth it is not averse to a massive government handout if it can get it. No doubt it was paying attention when Wisconsin promised Foxconn $3 billion to induce the Taiwanese flat screen giant to locate near Racine. Look for this to be an ugly pattern for any big company with a major facility to dangle for bait.
It is reported that Madison played that game by committing to an unspecified amount of tax incremental financing. Since Madison only provides TIF for projects that can demonstrate the need, it’s hard to understand how the city could promise it for a project that hasn’t even committed to a region, much less a specific site.
Rather than shooting for the moon with Amazon, MadREP and our government and civic leaders would be better off spending their time on the boring basics of good public management. Good concrete and digital infrastructure, a fine public school system, clean air and water, and an overall high quality of life are what will work to attract jobs. And even if they didn’t, these things would still be beneficial to the people who already live here and pay the taxes.
In addition, the Midwest has two more growing advantages — lots of clean, fresh water and relative climate change security. One look at the increasingly strong hurricanes flooding East and Gulf Coast cities while massive wildfires plague the West and you come to appreciate the relative calm of the heartland. Sooner or later companies are going to figure out that low odds for calamity are a Midwestern virtue.
The MadREP proposal is worse than just an exercise in futility. It’s an indication that our local leaders are being sucked into the loser’s game of lottery ticket economic development. We won’t get Amazon and, if we keep playing this game, we won’t get much of anything else.