Business leaders around the continent had been waiting with bated breath since corporate mammoth Amazon gave them an unprecedented assignment back in September: Convince us that your metro area should be our second home, our “HQ2.”

On Thursday, the Seattle-based online retail giant fired the starting gun on the second round of competition, releasing a list of 20 metro areas, winnowed down from 238, that made the cut. And Dallas-Fort Worth was on it, much to the delight of local officials.

But the announcement also reignited a smoldering debate about the use of tax breaks or other government-funded financial incentives — in Amazon's case, as much as $7 billion from New Jersey or $5 billion from Maryland — to lure business and investment to a given community.

It’s a debate with an added layer in a region whose leaders pitched an almost dizzying array of possible sites in multiple cities.

While officials have said that incentives are now a baseline to stay in the game, as they’ve offered Amazon deals worth billions in taxpayer money, critics of the practice have urged government leaders to strike a truce — or at the very least, make public their negotiations.

“We want the cities that made the finalist list to do two things,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonpartisan group that advocates for accountability in economic incentives — sometimes called corporate welfare. “One, disclose their bids, and two, we want them ... to raise the bar of the competition.”

If mayors from the cities on the list agreed to limit their incentive offers to a certain level, they won’t be participating in what LeRoy described as a public auction — instead, they’d be forced to compete more meaningfully.

“Who’s got the best transit? Who has the best executive talent pool?” he said. “Not who can give away the store.”

But that’s an unlikely scenario, given that even within the metroplex, there’s already competition.

When the Dallas Regional Chamber put together a combined proposal on behalf of cities and developers from around the the area, including Fort Worth, some cities, like Frisco, struck out on their own with more aggressive plays.

And the announcement of the finalists came the same morning that Fort Worth business advocates presented an ambitious plan to more aggressively recruit business in an effort to catch up with eye-popping job gains in Dallas and its northern suburbs.

Brandom Gengelbach, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce’s executive vice president of economic development, said just after he spoke at a breakfast event that for now, “the region has to be at the forefront.”

If the time comes, however, he said Fort Worth will be ready to compete with other D-FW contenders.

Mike Rosa, the Dallas Regional Chamber's senior vice president of economic development emphasized that the two business groups were still working together to promote the many sites.

The Chamber hasn’t released its proposal or any details about incentives that various cities have offered, but on Thursday he said that in “each community’s response, an incentive package was included.”

LeRoy said that approach is, essentially, backward when it comes to minimizing the amount of taxpayer incentives it’ll take to outbid other governments.

The one positive outcome of the Amazon parade was that metro areas were forced to cooperate and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses as a whole. So if Texas cities end up locked in a bidding war, it could reverse that progress.

“Who’s going to be the adult in the room ... [to say] ‘We’re not going to cut the throat of Plano for The Colony or wherever?’” he said.

Robert Allen, president and CEO of the Texas Economic Development Corporation, said it’s premature to discuss incentives at the state level, like a potential grant from the deal-closer Texas Enterprise Fund. With both Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin in the competition, state business advocates are just helping when they can.

“In a perfect world, we’d love to have both of them in the end,” he said.

In any case, said Nathan Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who’s studied the effectiveness of financial incentives for economic development, narrowing the list to 20 sites spread from coast to coast still leaves plenty of questions.

“I think this announcement doesn’t reveal much other than Amazon still wants additional negotiation,” he wrote in an email.