Madinah Wilson-Anton

Corporate welfare has been an issue for a while, but it's recently gotten more blatant and more secretive. In 2017, the DE Economic Development Office, a state agency, was replaced with the DE Prosperity Partnership, a public-private partnership subject to less transparency 2/

Since it's a non-profit, it doesn't respond to FOIA requests, even though it receives $2 million in taxpayer money. The DPP are the ones who initially worked with Amazon to get this deal set up. The deal itself was a grant given through the Delaware Strategic Fund. 3/

The Delaware Strategic Fund is a fund specifically meant to "facilitate the development of new programs to retain, attract and expand Delaware employment." It received $12.5 million in this fiscal year from the state legislature to use as loans, grants, and investments. 4/

With language that broad, it is a perfect vehicle for offering big checks to big corporations with limited guarantees for the public. It doesn't have to be that way, but when the whole process is kept opaque that's what it becomes. 5/

That meeting of the Council on Development Finance (appointed by the governor and state sen) was held yesterday: 9am on a Monday. I don't know about you, but I wasn't able to take off work for 3 hours in the morning to make my voice heard at this meeting on such short notice. 7/

And that was it. The last attempt at public accountability was no match for months of secret meetings within a bureaucratic, undemocratic business development system. It's these kinds of back-room deals that creates debacles like the state funding of Fisker & Bloom Energy 9/

Now, maybe this will work out. DE needs good-paying jobs, and Amazon has certainly made big promises. It's also encouraging to see that there are some conditions for receiving the money, unlike in past corporate welfare projects. But that isn't enough. 10/

Amazon has not committed to using DE construction workers on the project or mostly hiring DE employees, and 95% of the people they do hire will only be making between $31k and $33k a year. Yet it's all being funded with a limited pool of DE taxpayer money. 11/

In the third quarter of 2019, Amazon raised $70 billion in revenue. In all of 2020, the Strategic Fund was given $12.5 million to attract businesses to Delaware. So why should Delaware taxpayers be subsidizing Amazon? That is so incredibly backwards. 12/

We need to start focusing our business development on local small businesses, businesses that will use local, union construction workers, and businesses that will actually strengthen our communities — not multinational corporations that have no ties to our state 13/

We also need to work with other states to make sure that big corporations can't play us off one another to get bigger and bigger grants and subsidies as we race to cut regulations and lower our wages. The bullying has to end. 14/