Amazon required those involved in the process to sign nondisclosure agreements, leaving outsiders outraged when details of the deals were released only after they were finalized.
Now, New York lawmakers are taking aim at this kind of secretive process. On Thursday, Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn will introduce legislation that would ban New York City from entering into nondisclosure agreements during negotiations for prospective development projects. A similar bill will be introduced in Albany by state Sen. Michael N. Gianaris of Queens in the upcoming legislative session.
The efforts comes amid a nationwide backlash against Amazon and its HQ2 sweepstakes, which critics said allowed the online retail behemoth to collect data from cities across the nation and resulted in economic development officials offering massive incentives without public debate. In New York, officials gave Amazon city and state tax incentives and a state grant that together is worth roughly $3 billion, and approval to skirt the city’s land use review process.
“The process that Amazon required and that New York City acquiesced to forced cities to bid against one another in secret,” Lander said.
“That helped Amazon maximize tax breaks and features for its own benefit, but it hid the public economic development policy from the public. And that is bad for transparency, bad for economic development, bad for all of the cities that participated and, I think, bad for democracy.”
During the so-called HQ2 competition for a second headquarters, activists across the nation called for more transparency from Amazon and the cities that submitted bids. In places such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, city officials were pressured to reveal their bids. But that push for transparency has died down, said Nathan Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who closely tracked the Amazon selection process.
Now, even as New York contemplates banning nondisclosure agreements, Jensen said cities need to go further to fundamentally change the control that corporations have in economic development projects. For example, he thinks city councils should be able to vote on incentives a city might offer.
Ultimately, Lander argued the federal government should take the lead.
“In the ideal world, there would be federal policy to push back against the kind of crony capitalism that too often passes for economic development. But since we’re not going to get help from Washington, cities are going to have to do it for ourselves,” he said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration pushed back against Lander’s proposal, highlighting the benefits Amazon will bring to New York City.
“The city has secured thousands of good-paying jobs that will improve the lives of working families and give them security in a 21st-century economy,” Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for City Hall, said in a statement. “We will review any proposed legislation, but we remain very confident we took the right approach, and that the process ahead will foster significant public input.”
Lander and the two co-sponsors of the bill, Jumaane Williams and Jimmy Van Bramer, seem to have the initial support of the Council speaker, Corey Johnson, potentially setting up yet another confrontation between the City Council and de Blasio.
“I am deeply concerned about the use of NDAs in general and with the Amazon deal in particular, so I look forward to reviewing this bill as it moves through the legislative process,” Johnson said in a statement. “The public should have as much information as possible about these deals.”
Companies, including Amazon, have often argued nondisclosure agreements are necessary to protect proprietary information. But, Gianaris said New York’s Freedom of Information Law already protects that information.
“The idea that we allow private corporations to dictate what governments can and cannot share with the people they represent is offensive on many levels,” he said.
Lander’s bill is also the latest effort by the City Council to strip power from the mayor at a time when many lawmakers have expressed their displeasure with not being involved in the discussions surrounding Amazon’s move to Long Island City.
“I don’t like that the city shielded its bid from the public,” Lander said, adding that the bill was “certainly motivated by a desire to prevent that from happening again.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.