A receipt for $15,000 paid to interTrend Communications by Long Beach's Economic and Property Development Department for Amazon HQ2 proposal marketing.

Long Beach Spent over $28K Creating Two Amazon HQ2 Pitches

by Kevin Flores  |  Published January 27, 2018 in Journalism

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2/12/18 This story was updated to include a response from the city manager's office.

The city of Long Beach paid an ad agency and a consulting firm a combined $28,825 for expenses related to the production of two proposals submitted last October for Amazon’s “HQ2” project.

One pitch was created in tandem with the city of Huntington Beach, dubbed “Amazon Coast by HBLB,” while a second is part of a wider Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation nine-site bid that packages together several locations around the region.

Last week, Amazon announced a shortlist of 20 cities it had culled from the 238 originally vying to become home to HQ2. The massive facility will serve as the Seattle-based retailer’s second North American headquarters and employ 50,000 people, the company estimates.

The HBLB bid did not make the cut, and it is questionable whether the cities’ met the criteria Amazon was looking for from the outset.

“We were very confident. The City of Long Beach is a dynamic City that has much to offer its residents, businesses, and visitors. It is our opinion that the “Amazon Coast” proposal would have been a great option for Amazon,” said Kevin Lee the Interm Public Affairs Officer for the City Manager’s Office in an email.

Receipts and invoices obtained by FORTHE Media through a public records request show that Long Beach’s Economic and Property Development Department paid interTrend Communications, a local ad agency, $15,000 for promotional work related to the failed HBLB proposal.

Those funds were part of a $60,000 sum paid to interTrend Communications for HBLB proposal-related marketing services that was evenly split among the city of Long Beach, the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, the city of Huntington Beach, and Visit Huntington Beach.

The Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau is a private non-profit partially funded by city hotel bed taxes. It promotes economic development in the city, according to the organization’s website.

Additionally, the city paid $13,825 to Michael Baker International, a Pittsburgh-based consulting firm with offices in Long Beach, for data gathering, map creation and other work that went went into the HBLB and LAEDC bids, according to city officials and records.

That figure does not include line items included in the invoice that appear to be unrelated to the Amazon bids.

For comparison, the city of Irvine spent a total of $25,000 to create their Amazon HQ2 bid, according to public records.

The HBLB proposal was accompanied by an 80-second promo video featuring comedian Kevin Pollak and professional surfer Brett Simpson. A custom-made surfboard was also delivered to Amazon alongside the proposal.

The cost of the video production alone was over $38,000, according to an invoice  interTrend Communications sent to the cities’ and their visitors bureaus.

The HBLB proposal, kept secretly from the public throughout the RFP process, offered Amazon millions of dollars in tax incentives and envisioned a three-part campus for Amazon’s HQ2, with two sites in Long Beach and one site in Huntington Beach.

Despite the approximately 700,000 resident population between the cities, Lee said the cities exceeded the one million metro population requirement laid out by Amazon in their HQ2 request for proposal.

Tomisin Oluwole
Fragmented Reflection I, 2021
Acrylic on canvas panel
24 x 30 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

“It was clear that the city of Long Beach, in partnership with other cities in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), could meet all of the requirements set out by Amazon,” he said.

Mayor Robert Garcia wrote, “Let’s make a serious effort,” referencing Amazon’s RFP in a Sept. 7 email to his Chief of Staff Mark Taylor, City Manager Pat West, and Assistant City Manager Tom Modica, according to email records obtained by FORTHE Media.

Amazon expects to choose a suitor city for HQ2 sometime this year. Dallas and Washington D.C. are considered to be the top contenders, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Critics of cities’ efforts to lure Amazon’s facility fear that it will be a harbinger of gentrification and displacement wherever it ends up.

Though the HBLB bid is no more, Long Beach could still land some part of the headquarters. Among the 20 finalist chosen by Amazon was the Los Angeles County bid, however the LACEDC bid has not been made public yet.

“We have no doubt that the city of Long Beach will play an important role if Los Angeles is selected as Amazon’s HQ2,” Lee said.

Below are the receipts, invoices, and email records cited in this story.

Long Beach Amazon HQ2 Proposal Invoices & Receipts by FORTHE Media on Scribd

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Contact The Author

More by Kevin Flores
  kevin@forthe.org   @reporterkflores
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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition