Recently, the business and political communities from both sides of the state line came together in a very public way to submit a proposal for Amazon’s second headquarters, commonly referred to as HQ2. In fact celebrating the effort, along with a big BetterKCI rally, was a central theme at the KCADC’s annual meeting last week. Yet to my knowledge, there has been no discussion of any efforts at year ago to land Amazon’s first hub for their new cargo fleet, Prime Air.
I mentioned Amazon’s launching of air cargo service on this blog in May 2016. It was obvious that they were going to be looking for a new cargo hub since they didn’t have one and we were (are) perfectly positioned geographically and have the necessary runway capacity. Moreover, rent and other income from such a facility would make a nice dent in any debt payment on a new terminal.
In January of this year, Amazon announced it had reached a $1.49 billion dollar deal to bring their first hub and 2700 jobs to Cincinnati. Tweeting about it at the time, I had hoped someone would look into where our effort fell short. Or if there even was an effort.
As we prepare to vote on a billion dollar new terminal, it would be reassuring to know that we are already out there doing everything we can to ensure its financial security. There were a lot of high powered EDC and development people seated among the 1700 at KCADC’s event last week. Please let us know what you did to bring Prime Air to KCI. Are you out there already working on the inevitable Prime Hub 2 or are you just hoping for the phone to ring like it appears you did a year ago?
40 million according to this article. Seems substantial but maybe in the grand scheme will be nothing..not sure about the overall economic impact, etc.
https://www.inc.com/anna-hensel/amazon-air-cargo-hub-in-kentucky-likely-to-create-2000-jobs.html
I am not a cargo expert but typically air cargo hubs are situated in the center of the population geography, not necessarily true geography. Indy, Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati are all skewed further east than KC. These four also fall in the top 10 in 2016 for all cargo transactions (In North America). Keep in mind Kentucky also threw a ton of money at Amazon to locate there, something I am sure would get some of the “anti-government spend money” crowd some heartburn.
I don’t recall all the numbers but I think the KY money was very small compared to the project size. Relatively speaking, it was tiny compared to what Indy is spending to subsidize a regular flight to Paris.