Amazon playing a shell game with county contract and jobs

best bienes realtor We asked last week why Miami-Dade hadn’t built penalties into a contract on which global icon Amazon has defaulted, failing to staff a warehouse that was part of a sweetheart land deal. Contracts mean nothing if you can’t enforce them. Immediately thereafter, a committee voted 6-0 to ask the county commission to extend the contract a full year and exonerate Amazon without any penalty for defaulting – but not before members asked whether Amazon actually would ever open the million-square-foot warehouse on a former South Dade economic development site. Committee members didn’t openly question why officials have simply taken Amazon’s word for reasons it has failed to fulfill its contract to hire 325 workers at an average $32,000 wage. They should question that and more, because the county is doing whatever Amazon asks without probing the reasons for its failure. The committee heard from Alex Muñoz, the official in charge, that he hadn’t visited the Amazon site to verify what is happening – he’s acting merely on what Amazon said. He did promise to find out before the final county commission vote Oct. 3. Throughout the committee hearing last week, the word “default” was never uttered, though failure to fulfill a contract is exactly that. As we wrote last week, Amazon told the county it needs another year to hire 325 warehouse workers to handle orders. Clearly, that’s questionable. Why didn’t they hold job fairs in the three years since they signed the contract and hire people? McDonald’s and Burger King and many others in Amazon’s pay range have done it. Try paying an extra $1 an hour. “What is the holdup?” Airport and Economic Development Committee chair Raquel Regalado asked. “In a perfect world the resolution would tell me why you need the extension, but it doesn’t.” “The delay was because the project was a little bit delayed,” said Mr. Muñoz, now director of Internal Services but at the start of the contract the director of Animal Services. “They have now gotten to the point of hiring the 325 jobs. So the extension is for the hiring.” “Do you think you need a year to hire people?” Ms. Regalado asked. “It’s 325 jobs,” Mr. Muñoz replied, as though that was a mammoth task. “They communicated to us that they expect to do it faster than that, but they did ask for the year.” “I would feel more comfortable if it was like in tranches so we can at least get going,” Ms. Regalado said, asking for officials to negotiate for a six-month delay instead of a year. “We can get more details if you like before the commission meeting,” Mr. Muñoz said. Truly, it’s not merely what Ms. Regalado would like – it’s a question of the verification pivotal to any county contract, especially for 77 acres that the county sold to Amazon at millions below top appraisal in return for Amazon meeting explicit terms. There’s no excuse that an unexpected pandemic intervened: the contract was signed during the pandemic, when Amazon was booming and rushing to add capacity to meet demand. It surely could have hired people in a flash had that boom continued – which it hasn’t. No boom, no hurry. So Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins asked Mr. Muñoz 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?” She pressed Mr. Muñoz, “What happens if the warehouse doesn’t ultimately open up? Because I raised the issue some time ago that Amazon was closing [a large] number of warehouses because they overextended their expectations as a result of the pandemic and all of these other things and this warehouse is I think one of these examples.” “So there’s provisions in the contract … that we’d have to enforce,” Mr. Muñoz replied, not pinpointing anything the county could or would actually do. “That’s why we’re doing an extension, because that’s one of the compliance requirements was the jobs…. We would think that they’re, you know, going to use the warehouse, but again as Commissioner Regalado asked us to reach out, we’ll get more information to try to shore that up for you.” “Have they made any improvements on the structure or is it just a shell?” Commissioner Keon Hardemon asked. “I haven’t been there myself,” Mr. Muñoz admitted, but he was quickly told in an aside that “they’re finishing up the interior, that’s part of the investment. The shell, the building, is complete.” Until someone inspects the site, commissioners will never know if Amazon has yet put in the sophisticated equipment needed to pull items from shelves and convey them to human workers for shipments. If the warehouse isn’t fully operational, all Amazon has built is a shell – not a workplace. We welcome Amazon, as we would any employer offering 325 jobs. But the county has a responsibility to fully answer all the tough questions before extending the Amazon deal even a day. If the county does extend it, it must build into the extension real and painful penalties for future defaults. Why the current contract didn’t have firm penalties is a riddle only Amazon lobbyists could answer. Related Posts: * Amazon defaults on county contract: where is protection? * FYI Miami: July 20, 2023 * What, no options to $99.90 a trip transit? Hey, taxi! Uber! * $600 million Miami International Airport deal to… * $73 million Miami International Airport bid nets $94… The post Amazon playing a shell game with county contract and jobs appeared first on Miami Today. agent top miami real
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