The city of Fort Worth offered an incentive package worth $443.2 million to lasso Amazon’s second headquarters and bring it to Cowtown, documents released Thursday show.
The city and the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce released details of a presentation sent to the e-commerce and technology behemoth (Nasdaq: AMZN) last fall touting the benefits of Fort Worth as a business destination.
Documents show Fort Worth offered a Chapter 380 economic development grant worth up to $438 million based on Amazon’s $750 million in capital investment and at least 10,000 jobs.
The city also included $1.5 million in fee waivers and a $3.75 million Enterprise Zone nomination. Through that partnership program between the state and a municipality, approved projects are eligible to apply for state sales and use tax refunds on qualified expenditures. The amount of the refund is related to the capital investment amount and number of jobs created, and the Amazon HQ2 project was offered the maximum allowed.
Fort Worth also offered to reimburse up to 90 percent of incremental taxes on real and business property for a 20-year period. Tarrant County offered to abate up to 70 percent over a 10-year period.
Brandom Gengelbach, executive vice president of Economic Development for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, said Fort Worth’s incentive package was comparable to those offered by other cities.
“It’s like the Super Bowl,” he said. “There are lots of bright lights and extra attention, but it’s the same game you’ve played a thousand times before. You don’t win or lose a project on incentives alone. The criteria and approach businesses use to determine a potential expansion or relocation do not change.”
Fort Worth partners also offered discounted airfare and a dedicated service and check-in station for Amazon employees at DFW International Airport, and pledged to work with Amazon on the installation of Smart City and Smart Building technology for HQ2.
Seven sites and site combinations were proposed in Sundance Square, Panther Island, AllianceTexas, Walsh, Clearfork and Overland. Fort Worth’s package highlighted its access to abundant and diverse talent, logistics, STEM education efforts and university partners, multi-modal travel, and a community spirit that “defies expectations.”
Gengelbach said the region may use new ideas generated by the Amazon pitch, such as a split headquarters between Dallas and Fort Worth with the Trinity Railway Express (commuter rail) connecting the two. This approach would leverage the strengths of the full DFW area, allowing for more efficient use of community resources and maximizing the region’s labor force.
The Fort Worth Chamber is currently working with more than 60 potential projects for the Fort Worth area that range in employee count and investment, Gengelbach said.
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Dallas, which also battled for Amazon’s second headquarters, offered up to $1.2 billion from the city and state in economic incentives.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings shared Dallas' four-page proposal of incentives for Amazon HQ2 just hours after learning the city did not win the massive project.
City leaders in 20 finalist locations offered record-setting incentives to entice Amazon to attract what initially was described as a single project with 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment.
Seattle-based Amazon announced earlier this month it will split the second headquarters between the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City in the Queens borough of New York. The company also will put a 5,000-employee operations hub in Nashville.
Dallas’ incentives package would have included $600 million from the city and $500 million from the state, or about $22,000 for each of the 50,000 jobs.
The combined incentive packages offered by New York, Virginia and Tennessee totaled almost $2.5 billion. Some states offered incentives topping $8 billion.
Like Fort Worth’s package, Dallas’ incentives included some unconventional offers, including a waiver for all pet adoption fees at the Dallas Animal Services shelter for Amazon employees, and an offer of free microchipping services until 2022 to all Amazon pets, whether or not adopted from the shelter.
The city of Arlington, which exited the HQ2 contest in May, offered Amazon up to $921 million in incentives to put its second headquarters at Globe Life Park, which the Texas Rangers will leave behind for the new Globe Life Field in 2020.
Arlington’s incentives included a 100-percent real and business personal property tax abatement for 10 years, a waiver of building and impact fees and a grant for the company to hire Arlington residents.
