Stephen Fuller

“There is a growing recognition that we can’t just be a company town. You put Amazon in the mix—this is a headquarters function. They say the average income is $100,000, maybe more, and there could be 5,000 people coming right away. Even that would be very meaningful. What that does is it counteracts what has been happening. From March 2017 to March 2018, we had 6,700 fewer federal workers. That loss of employment cost the economy $1.13 billion in economic activity. Our economy is struggling. We’ve been creating lower-value-added jobs—ones that are dependent largely on local spending to support them—in restaurants, personal services, retail sales—and we’re losing higher-value-added jobs because the federal sector has been shrinking and the federal-contracting sector hasn’t been growing.

“We haven’t even counted the vendors that support an operation like Amazon. All of the other jobs—there’s probably another 25,000 to 30,000 that are pretty good jobs, ranging from security to all the equipment servicing, the building management. Then the spending that these workers generate on Main Street within the local economy would be very helpful as well. On top of that, whoever gets Amazon then becomes visible to every other business, as in ‘If Amazon is in Washington, we should be there, too.’ This is good for us.”