No more free passes as required Amazon jobs disappear

Finally showing spunk in a sweetheart Amazon deal whose rules the behemoth treats as mere suggestions, Miami-Dade commissioners this week are at last looking at enforcing a jobs requirement.
Unfortunately, and unforgivably, a county land sale tied to at least 325 jobs never included penalties if Amazon failed to meet the guarantee, which it has done repeatedly.

When Amazon didn’t open a $129 million warehouse in Naranja as its land purchase required, the county merely extended the date a year.

When Amazon didn’t hire a single person in three years under a deal that required 325 jobs in two years, the county accepted the lame excuse that Amazon couldn’t find people in the lower-income area to take the jobs. Meanwhile, Amazon was hiring 3,000 Floridians for the Christmas rush.

When Amazon said last month that it was closing the warehouse for two years and releasing 1,000 workers while it refits the brand-new structure, again ignoring the requirement that 325 or more jobs must be secure until 2041, that passed with another county yawn.

Until now.

This week, Danielle Cohen Higgins seeks a commission vote to tell the mayor to do whatever it takes to enforce requirements the county put into a sale that handed Amazon 77 acres at $3 million below top appraised value. Those restrictions included both opening the warehouse and keeping the jobs in place until 2041.

The legislation asks the mayor to act “either by demand, negotiation, negotiation of amendments, or bringing suit.” The mayor would have to report on those actions and Amazon’s intent for the distribution hub and its jobs.

The vital request faces a significant barrier: the sale agreement in 2020 recorded restrictions on the land based on an open Amazon operation and the jobs, but it listed no penalties if Amazon didn’t comply.

“The county should routinely cement into deals penalties for defaults,” we wrote in a 2023 series of columns assessing this bungled deal. “The 2020 contract could have required Amazon to pay the county a slice of the unpaid required wages…” Whatever the penalties, they should have been part of the agreements.

That comment came just after Amazon was given an extra year to hire 325 people and get the distribution center open, but it’s equally applicable as Amazon prepares to shut down the site again for the next two years and discharge the employees.

Echoing what we said then, land targeted for economic development and sold below value to Amazon will now do the area no good for two more years. Meanwhile, about $21 million in Amazon wages required in the land restriction won’t be paid.

When we suggested that the county trust Amazon but verify its claims, we overestimated the corporate giant. “We expect Amazon to open someday and stay open long enough to meet its 17-year operating contract,” was our 20

23 assessment. Instead, when Amazon closes in July it will mark less than two years of operation.

Should we again take Amazon at its word that those jobs will return in our lifetimes?

In September 2023, before the warehouse opened, Ms. Cohen Higgins asked the official overseeing the land’s use why “this warehouse has sat empty and continues to sit empty and we are with an item now asking for a 12-month extension for them to produce jobs?… I don’t know whether they’re going to get any jobs in there in the next six months or 12 months, but it would be my suspicion, or I’m going to raise the question of, whether this facility will really ever open, and if it doesn’t open what happens at that point?”

Well, her suspicions have proven valid less than two years after opening of an Amazon center whose life seems to shift with economics. The deal for the land came during a massive boom in warehousing and distribution as Covid-19 took hold. Opening was delayed as the pandemic receded. The current shutdown seems to respond again to outside forces.

Businesses do react to economics. They should.

But businesses also meet contractual obligations – or they should. Amazon’s sweetheart deal for an economic development land site included maintenance of operations and jobs. Amazon isn’t going out of business and must meet its obligations. But while the agreements are in the land documents, no penalties are listed for closing and laying off the workers.

I don’t know what remedies the county has when a corporate giant defaults over and over on a requirement yet documents don’t provide penalties. A lack of penalties isn’t Amazon’s fault but the county’s. Yet the corporation is ignoring its agreement.

The county isn’t going to repossess land that now is improved with a warehouse. But it shouldn’t just wink and let Amazon ignore its obligations.

If the commission passes the resolution from Ms. Cohen Higgins, it will be left to Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to pick up the pieces of a deal to bring needed jobs to a needy community. That is no easy task.

What should be easy is to make firm county policy to never again produce toothless restrictions. Defaults should face firm and sure penalties from the outset that are then enforced. We’ve written too often about Amazon getting free passes.