Cities Dial Amazon Direct

After Connecticut spurned them, New Haven and Bridgeport took a quest to land a $5 billion new corporate campus directly to the company doing some high-stakes shopping: Amazon.

The two cities Monday submitted a joint proposal to the Seattle-based online retailing behemoth to seek to land its planned new eight million square-foot second main corporate campus (aka ​“HQ2”).

Cities across the country are competing to land the headquarters, which, like the company’s product offerings, is expected to come with a hefty discount (n the form of tax breaks).

Connecticut had asked cities to submit proposals that it would then forward to Amazon; it rejected the joint New Haven-Bridgeport bid. So New Haven Mayor Toni Harp and Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim — whose cities have been forming a closer business and political identity in recent months — decided to refine the pitch to take directly to Amazon. The mayors held a press conference Monday in the Park City to announce that they’ve submitted the proposal. (Click here to read a previous story about it.)

Ganim noted that a non-disclosure agreement with Amazon prevents the cities from publicly releasing the proposal.

Originally they were going to pitch a plan in which four million of the square feet would be in New Haven, centered downtown around the vanishing Route 34 Connector, and four million in Bridgeport. The idea was to convince Amazon that the two cities are so close together that in other parts of the country they’d be considered one municipal unit, so in fact the eight million square feet still fell in ​“one” city.

Staffers working on the proposal called Amazon and learned that it would not accept that divide, New Haven economic development chief Matthew Nemerson said in an interview. So the cities offered Amazon two options from which to choose: spreads of eight million square feet in either city. It remains a joint proposal, highlighting the 17 colleges and universities in the region as well as a combined labor force of over one million people. (Filing singly, the two cities would not have met the one million threshold required by the company.)

Nemerson said New Haven found additional land at the Sports Haven site and the Long Wharf food terminal. ​“If need be,” he said — in other words, if Amazon does miraculously pick the New Haven-Bridgeport proposal — New Haven could ​“talk to Yale about” making more land available around the old Lee High School property in the Hill.

“When you’re talking about $5 billion worth of buildings,” buying a $30-$40 million site probably wouldn’t present much of a problem, he ventured.

Government and business leaders said that whatever happens with this proposal — a long shot for any city, even one that is actually one city — the process has brought together Greater New Haven and Greater Bridgeport leaders in a way that promises productive future collaboration.

“We do not have metropolitan regions in Connecticut,” Harp said at Monday’s event. ​“So we decided we would have a metropolitan region here.”

Usually ​“mayors come together on policy stuff,” Ganim noted. ​“This is a much more substantive and a much deeper commitment and relationship that you don’t see too often.” He praised the unofficial dubbing of the joint entity as ​“Bridgehaven.”

At the press conference, Ganim and Harp showed a 30-second commercial that pitches the ​“New Haven Bridgeport region” to employers. The video — which can be viewed near the beginning of the below Facebook Live video from Monday’s event — touts the joint region’s allegedly effective transportation system and ​“the largest educated workforce in the Northeast.”