The promise of 50,000 high-paying jobs, a $5 billion construction investment and a generational transformation has 238 potential sites in North America climbing over each other to woo tech giant Amazon and its so-called HQ2. One lucky winner will claim the right to join Seattle as a center of operations for the company, but at what cost?

Chicago is offering Amazon something called an income tax diversion, by which billions of dollars in income taxes paid by its own employees revert to the corporate giant. New Jersey is offering $7 billion in incentives if Amazon opens up shop in Newark. Fresno, Calif., is offering to funnel taxes generated by Amazon into a fund overseen in part by Amazon itself.

Nashville’s bid has not been released, despite public records requests made by the Scene to both the city and the state. (The bid was overseen by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, a private entity, which also declined to share the proposal with the Scene.) But it’s not just the public who can’t see the bid: Members of the Metro Council, who would have to approve an incentive package for Amazon, tell the Scene they haven’t seen it either.

“I would be very curious to see what we are giving away,” says District 31 Councilmember Fabian Bedne. He adds that he doesn’t want to micromanage the negotiations, but still, he says, “We never learn about these things until it’s too late.”

Bedne, who’s supporting a proposed ordinance that would increase transparency in such economic incentive deals, thinks the proposals coming out of Chicago, New Jersey and elsewhere are a bridge too far.

“It looks like a race to the bottom,” he says. “There has to be a limit of what you are giving away in an effort to get a deal.”

Though the city wouldn’t release the bid itself, email discussions about the process released through the records request indicate Nashville might shy away from the mega-incentives offered by other cities and states.

“It’s a crazy free-for-all out there,” Matt Wiltshire, director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Community Development, recently wrote in one of those emails, responding to a news story about some other cities’ proposals. He called another story “absurd.”

When discussing the Amazon bid with Brian Moyer, Nashville Technology Council president and CEO, Wiltshire was cautiously optimistic.

“I generally am skeptical on the return on investing in chasing these mega-deals, but this is one that’s worth it,” he wrote. “It’s going to be tough to get someone comfortable with the idea of hiring [50,000] employees in Nashville, but I think we can make the case.”

The state’s economic and community development division also declined to release the Amazon incentive package, citing an exception in state records law that covers ongoing projects that do not have an executed grant contract. Instead, they gave the Scene a receipt from an employee’s Amazon purchase of a book and a few other unrelated emails that included the word “Amazon.”

Davidson County’s unemployment rate hovered just above an astonishingly low 2 percent in October, which in part forced Bedne and others to ask if we really need 50,000 new jobs.

In 2014, the council pledged $56 million in tax incentives to Bridgestone Americas, a deal that anticipated the company relocating its corporate headquarters and 1,100 employees to a new downtown tower and eventually adding 600 more jobs. The council passed a $14 million incentive package earlier this year for Ryman Hospitality’s planned water park at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center.

Despite those and other recent deals, Anthony Davis — the District 7 councilmember who introduced the transparency legislation that Bedne supports — says the strong economy has a lot to do with a reduction in incentives for big corporations.

“If the economy was down, you’d see a lot more deals,” says Davis. “With the economy hot, you’re not seeing as many. Nashville has done a good job of competing against other cities with these deals, but we haven’t gone overboard.”

Bedne was first elected to the Metro Council in November 2011, when Davidson County’s unemployment rate was more than three times what it is today. At that time, he says, he was “supportive of pretty much any project that would bring in jobs.” But now that the economy has recovered for many, it might be time, he says, to reassess what the city incentivizes.

“In the economy that we are in now, there should be more in the incentives than just jobs,” says Bedne. “At this point we are also looking for other things.” Those things, he says, include affordable housing.

Mayor Megan Barry played coy when she told CNN that she was more focused on her multibillion-dollar transit initiative than attracting Amazon’s HQ2.

“We sent them a letter,” Barry told CNN in October. “We said, ‘Hey, we’d love to have you.’ It’s much more important for us to pass a $5.2 billion transit initiative than it is to worry about Amazon.”

But just two weeks earlier, Barry was recording a video appeal to be included in the region’s Amazon pitch, according to a script and emails released to the Scene.

“At its core, Nashville is a business-friendly place,” said Barry, according to the script. “Nashville currently has the lowest property tax rate in [the] history of the city. Nashville offers over a dozen potential development sites across the region that fit many if not all of the criteria that Amazon has identified as important attributes in a future HQ2. As you investigate these sites more closely, I am confident that you will find an ideal home to offer you the operational efficiencies as you grow here with our great city.”



