San Antonio, Bexar County bow out of bid for Amazon’s second headquarters

San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg speaks with the media in his office on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg speaks with the media in his office on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017. Photo: Bob Owen, Staff / San Antonio Express-News Photo: Bob Owen, Staff / San Antonio Express-News Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close San Antonio, Bexar County bow out of bid for Amazon’s second headquarters 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

San Antonio and Bexar County officials are bowing out of the competition for Amazon’s proposed $5 billion second headquarters, reversing course from their initial plans to put together a competitive bid, officials said.

“Blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg wrote in a joint letter sent Wednesday to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The Seattle e-commerce giant invited cities last month to submit bids by Oct. 19 for the location of its second headquarters, HQ2, promising 50,000 new jobs that pay an average of more than $100,000 a year. The solicitation set off a feeding frenzy among cities across the U.S. as economic development directors scrambled to impress Bezos with unique perks and tax incentives. Tuscon, Arizona reportedly sent a 21-foot cactus to Bezos and a town in Georgia offered to rename some of its land “the city of Amazon.”

“It’s hard to imagine that a forward-thinking company like Amazon hasn’t already selected its preferred location,” Nirenberg and Wolff said. “And if that’s the case, then this public process is, intentionally or not, creating a bidding war amongst states and cities.”

That sentiment was echoed by elected officials and business leaders.

“Amazon is a very brilliant company for no other reason that they know that every city will fall over themselves to give the company what it needs because it’s a huge prize,” District 4 Councilman Rey Saldaña said. “I suspect the company already knew where they were going before they made the announcement.”

Amazon’s very public approach to soliciting bids from municipalities for their new headquarters is “a completely new way of doing expansions and I believe it’s probably the way companies are going to seek incentives in the future,” said Ramiro Cavazos, CEO and president of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

“All it does it create an arms race for incentives that is really going to make it challenging for a city that has limited resources to compete,” Cavazos said. “We may not have the same per capita income and corporate base than other cities that we want to compete against will. And if we put everything on the table, that may hurt us for a future proposal down the road.”

The decision not to bid changes course from last month when a team consisting of the city, the county and the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation said it was “engaged and ready to pursue this opportunity,” according to a statement released at the time by Erica Hurtak, spokeswoman for the foundation.

Hurtak said Wednesday that the city reviewed the bidding criteria and decided that it didn’t have a chance at winning the bid.

“As aspirational as we are about our community’s potential, we simply wouldn’t be highly competitive from a real estate and incentives perspective,” she said in a statement.

The news came one day after Nirenberg said the city needs a major international airport with nonstop flights to make the city “a competitive, long-term air option.”

But, the airport’s lack of nonstop flights wouldn’t have been as big a factor in Amazon’s decision as city’s workforce, said Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert.

“The big one I think we need to overcome more than the airport is the pipeline of labor,” Calvert said in an interview Wednesday. “Our labor force is really our Achilles’ heel.”

Saldaña cast the decision not to pursue the campus as a chance for the city and county to reckon with shortcomings in transportation and education.

“We’re recognizing that the problems that we have to solve are not because Amazon told us we need to work on these problems,” Saldaña said. “We recognized these are issues around transportation, around our airport, around our educational attainment levels that go back 40 years. Frankly, if Amazon was the spark, I’ll take it.”

Saldaña later added, “Economic development is not about dollars and free land anymore. It’s also about how well a company feels that your community is able to carry forward the momentum of their company’s ethos.”

Calvert called the decision not to pursue the Amazon campus “a big mistake.”

“It’s almost like we’re trying to be second-tier,” Calvert said. “We’re not even the little engine that could. We couldn’t even be the Jamaican bobsled team. To be honest, we’re fourth-tier.”

Earlier Wednesday, U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz asked Bezos to consider Texas for the second headquarters, saying San Antonio and other Texas cities are fast becoming “global hubs for technology, data-driven business, and talent.”

Bezos has some Texas ties. According to Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, the 53-year-old Albuquerque native spent many summers on a 24,000-acre ranch in Cotulla with his grandfather. Bezos founded aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin, which conducts engine and flight testing at a range near Van Horn in West Texas.

And the Amazon CEO — currently valued at $84.6 billion by Forbes — has ponied up $42 million for the construction of a mechanical clock designed to tell time for 10,000 years to be built underneath land he owns in the Sierra Diablo mountain range in West Texas, according to Wired magazine. The clock is symbolic and intended to encourage long-term thinking.

Houston Chronicle staff writer Collin Eaton contributed to this article.

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