Arlington Offered 23M For Amazon Hq2. Thanks To The Pandemic It Hasn T Had To Pay A Dime.

Comment Ahead of a reporting deadline this week, Arlington officials confirmed Wednesday that they did not pay any direct financial incentives to the company for the third year in a row. “Largely because of the pandemic, that expected growth hasn’t happened, and so that means the incentives aren’t happening either,” County Board Chair Katie Cristol (D) said. If the news may suggest less of an economic windfall for the county than officials and executives had touted just a few years ago, the company and its boosters say it’s too soon to make any snap judgments. Pandemic or not, the company’s economic impact on Arlington is impossible to ignore: Besides occupying 1 million square feet of office space, the company has hired more than 5,00o employees, putting it one-fifth of the way toward its stated goal of bringing at least 25,000 new jobs to Northern Virginia. Arlington had been on average collecting nearly $25 million annually from the tax, which is applied to hotel stays and short-term rentals such as Airbnb. That figure dropped to about $16.5 million in fiscal 2020, including the first few months of the pandemic, and then $5 million in the year after that. “It’s no benefit, no cost, as it should be,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks government subsidies to businesses. Some other jurisdictions, LeRoy noted, have been struggling with no-strings-attached incentives that they handed up for economic development projects whose fiscal benefits have yet to materialize. “In Arlington, they insulated themselves against any kind of downturn,” he said, “and that turned out to be very smart.” If that the tax revenue grows beyond a certain baseline, Arlington officials must dedicate up to half the increase toward infrastructure projects in the neighborhood, such as streetscape and sidewalk improvements. The county received $4.1 million from July 2021 through June of this year, still short of a $4.8 million baseline, she said. The first installment of those incentives, capped at $200 million, is supposed to be paid out next year.