$16 million in incentives from Arlington County and Virginia (humiliatingly, a small fraction of the $62 million-and-counting MoCo and Maryland taxpayers had to shell out just to move the Marriott deck chair down the Titanic deck from Rock Spring to downtown Bethesda) were just part of the success story. More business-friendly tax rates and regulations, Metro proximity and direct highway access were some of the advantages Rosslyn enjoyed. "Virginia offers a business-friendly environment," Nestle said in a press release Wednesday.
"Easy access to transportation" was a major factor, according to the Washington Post. 1812 N. Moore is right at the Rosslyn Metro station, and has direct highway access to I-66, I-395, the Whitehurst Freeway, Jefferson Davis Highway, and the George Washington Memorial Parkway, plus straight shots to Reagan National and Dulles airports.
Virginia was already home to over 70 corporate headquarters, and to many more Fortune 500 corporate headquarters than Montgomery County or Maryland. Nestle is a Fortune Global 500 company.
According to the Post, Virginia had been courting Nestle for over a year. Not a word was spoken about pursuing Nestle by Montgomery County elected officials during that time. As the top food company on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Nestle would have been a good fit for the White Oak area, near the FDA. Or in an office tower above the Wheaton or Bethesda Metro stations. The Council didn't even try.
And so, the humiliation continues. Montgomery County has failed to attract a single major corporate headquarters in two decades. It is the only jurisdiction in the D.C. region to suffer a net loss in private sector jobs since 2000; all others around us had a net gain. Our elected officials' intentional failure to complete our master plan highway system has left us with the worst traffic congestion in the nation, and no direct access to Dulles International Airport, the preferred flight hub for international companies.
As a result, Montgomery County finds itself a bedroom community for the job centers elsewhere in our region. Our private sector economy is moribund. The County is running a long-term structural budget deficit, as expenditures continue to swamp revenues. Even our once top-rated school system in now in a steady decline.
It's clear our County elected officials don't understand how the private sector business world works, and have no interest in learning. Time and again, they've proven they can't hit major league pitching when it comes to economic development. The results are being borne by the taxpayers in the form of record taxes, to make up for the low revenues our incompetent County Council has generated through its failed policies.
Voters will have to finish the job in 2018 they began by approving term limits in 2016. Throw the bums out.
37 comments:
Why no mention that 1812 N. Moore St. has been completely vacant for three years now?
5:13am, and what is sad, I knew before the Post broke it, patiently waiting. Accuracy is better than first though.. The RD seems to get stories straighter than most. Nestle has a factory in PG, so that is even funnier.. surrounded but no joy here.
5:17: Because they won, and the MoCo Council lost. A W is a W.
RD, I'm usually with you, but humiliated!?!? Companies settling down in Rosslyn with is scenic views and highways aren't even considering MoCo (at least no seriously). That's not who we are. Now, if they had gone to Tysons, I'd be with you.
Remember when we were told White Flint would be MoCo's Tysons in regards to corporate headquarters?
5:51: Nestle was also considering Georgia, which isn't Rosslyn either, but likely has a friendlier business climate like Virginia. So, yes, our "wise and experienced" County Council were indeed humiliated, whipped by Georgia as well as Rosslyn.
So will you get a job there?
You find me a building in MoCo that'll add a gym, conference center, place my logo on both sides of the building, and create a separate entrance for my employees and I'll come to MoCo - oh, and the rent has to be 50% of what others are paying.
That's how they got this deal done, dummy. 1812 was desperate for an anchor tenant and made ridiculous, value-impairing concessions to get the deal done.
6:21: No, but the four councilmembers who will be unemployed in November 2018 might want to dust off their college resumes - they've been living off the public dime ever since.
6:31: The Council are the dummies. They're unable to present an enticing deal, and have created the most hostile business climate on the east coast.
Nestle would have a been a huge get for MoCo.
5:51; you are spot on, Nestle wouldn't bat an eyelash at MoCo or Tysons given the sweet deal they were handed, plus the view. And as far as Georgia is concerned you are really grouping at straws to make an argument that doesn't hold water. Fact less drool.
@6:31AM The myriad economic benefits to the county would outweigh any "sweetened" lease deals to Nestle.
MoCo and the City of Rockville gave Choice Hotels quite a few incentives to anchor the Town Square with their new corporate headquarters.
Since when has bringing jobs to the county been a bad thing?
@6:39 RD - while the Council can make enticing deals, its ultimately the landlord's call, dimwit. In an industry that is based on capitalizing investments, these impairments to 1812 have totally destroyed the building's value at the opportunity cost of gaining a tenant. A tax break here or there cannot be sold, so regardless of the council's offering package to Nestle, no sensible owner would bring them in under the terms agreed upon at 1812.
So tired of this BS one-sided "reporting." At this point, only a complete idiot would believe Dyer's clueless articles. He sees a headline and doesn't get any facts about the entire nature of the situation, but never misses an opportunity to slander planners, developers, the county council, or the county exec., or praise fuhrer Trump.
I'm glad we didn't get Nestle. If Virginia is so "great" for business why do they keep on having to shell out money??? Arlington/Virginia is giving them $16 million of taxpayer money for 750 jobs but won't collect a nickel in corporate income tax, because the actual HQ is in Switzerland.
Marriott will host nearly 4,000 jobs in Bethesda (not oounting Ritz-Carlton in Friendship Heights, or the inevitable Starwood move from CT) and will pay back it's $44 million "loan" to the county and state within 10 years through taxes on the $2 billion in profit it makes annually.
VA loves to promote their "headquarters" but in truth, they don't generate as much jobs as you would think. Discovery, Choice, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, MedImmune, etc. all employ more people than Opower, Northrop Grumman, Hilton, and VW at their VA headquarters. Also, why doesn't Dyer explain why AOL, Sprint, and ExxonMobil all abandoned VA for greener pastures within the past decade?
"Arlington/Virginia is giving them $16 million of taxpayer money for 750 jobs"
And only half of those positions will be new jobs for local residents. The rest are staff relocating from California.
@ 8:24 AM - That's $43,000 for each new local job. Guaranteed minimum income would be a better bargain.
@7:55 AM If you're against government subsidies, I guess you would have been ok with Choice Hotels walking away to VA or DC?
AOL has been acquired a couple of times...
8:41 am - Although AOL was part of AOL Time Warner (later Time Warner) from 2000 through 2009, it had a separate headquarters facility in Dulles. That moved to New York in 2007.
AOL was spun off from Time Warner in 2009, and was acquired by Verizon, also headquartered in New York, in 2015.
Verizon also owns the remnants of former NoVa companies MCI and UUNet.
The irony is that New York City would score much lower than MoCo on the criteria for "business-friendly" that Dyer uses.
Maybe they couldn't get them to hand over another public parking garage for their exclusive use.
7:10: It was reported by the Washington Business Journal that Georgia was indeed the other option Nestle was weighing against Virginia. Facts.
7:55: "BS one-sided reporting" - I'll leave that to other local news outlets, where the County Council can do no wrong and the reporters get daily "attaboys" from the Council.
I'm the real journalist in Bethesda.
If you didn't notice, Hogan and Leggett keep shelling out money too. The difference is, we don't get the Fortune 500 companies.
Everybody from Northrop to Lidl knows Virginia is the place to be for a corporate headquarters.
If you want the view of Bethesda from an intern or freelancer's rose colored glasses, you have several other news outlets available to browse!
I think this mostly came down to the building, and than somewhat location. 1812 N Moore has been sitting empty for years. It was the laughingstock among people in commercial real estate. I'm sure the developer gave Nestle a sweet, sweet deal (see what I did there?) on rent just to get someone in there.
Then location -- Reagan Airport just down the road, and Dulles down the other direction. No bridge crossing hassles to get to either when you've finished a day's worth of meetings and need to catch flights back to Switzerland (which leave in the early evening) or elsewhere.
There wasn't much MoCo could do short-term to address this. They can't open a new bridge crossing, and BWI doesn't have the international flight network a multinational needs. You can't move MoCo closer to their airports.
The best space for Nestle vacancy-wise was probably somewhere in Rock Spring, but those buildings are older and here Nestle had an opportunity to go into a brand new building, meeting the latest LEED (environmental) standards, at an excellent price.
The tax incentives were just icing on the cake. I bet they would have done the deal even without them.
I'm a strong fan of Dyer's "Throw the bums out" mantra, but in this case I don't think MoCo could have done much.
@12:39PM Feel free to continue believing every comment you disagree with is written by Robert Dyer. Whatever gets you through the night...
"I'm the real journalist in Bethesda."
Lol
1:53 PM still believes you can't be a journalist unless you work for a legacy print publication AND have a super secret journalist badge.
10:36: Thanks for making some well-reasoned arguments to add to the discussion, in contrast to the flame-throwing paid troll. Two things I would add is that we can get closer to Dulles by building a new bridge to connect to Route 28 in Virginia. The Council has declined to do that, or even put it back in the master plan. Second, very few new Class A office buildings are being constructed here. The Council - with their push in places like Rock Spring - are disincentivizing office in favor of residential. So while the defense and aerospace contractors will want custom built campuses in office parks, we are at a disadvantage in having little new inventory standing by for firms like Nestle, as you pointed out.
Building the "Second Crossing", which Virginia opposes, would only make a fraction of Montgomery County "closer to Dulles". Most of the County's population would benefit from a wider Beltway from the American Legion Bridge to the I-270 spur.
And make Virginia do something about that awful merge onto the Dulles Access Road coming from the Outer Loop of the Beltway. You need to cross six lanes in just one mile.
"...we are at a disadvantage in having little new inventory standing by..."
Yes, what we really need is some huge office buildings that will remain completely vacant for several years after delivery.
"Intern" = what #UnsignedDyer calls anyone who is not a middle-aged failure like himself.
10:36 here. I think we need both -- widen the Am. Legion Bridge and a second crossing. I'm not sure why people think VA opposes it. If you drive up route 28, you can see how it was built to be exactly that -- they redid the road to interstate standards. To see what I mean, get off the toll road at 28N, and about 1 mile up on the right (near the VW dealer) you'll see a Shell station just beside the road, but not accessible directly from 28 -- that used to connect directly to the old road, but they had to close off that crossing since it doesn't meet interstate standards then.
Still, any project like that is at a minimum 10 years out, and Nestle had to decide with today in mind.
As for the Am Legion Bridge, the bridge itself is actually 5 lanes wide, and VA recently expanded their side to 5-6 lanes leading up to it. MD can get a quick win just by making the right-most lane (that leads on/off Clara Barton parkway) from a right-turn only lane to right and straight. Then, just after the bridge on the MD side, there's plenty of room from there up to the split to add in another lane.
However, does the Council have much control over this? I assumed it's an MD SHA project since it's on an interstate.
As for shrinking Class A office space in MoCo, I'm guessing it's a chicken-egg type problem. Demand for Class A in MoCo is down = developers don't build it = no one asks for it since it's not there any more. Vicious cycle.
8:06: Virginia doesn't oppose a second crossing - the governor and Senator Mark Warner are on the record strongly favoring a new bridge. It not only would bring the I-270/Bethesda areas closer to Dulles for economic development purposes, but would also get traffic off the Beltway when the new road is connected to I-95 in Virginia at a later date (in other words, an Outer Beltway).
2:11: Time is passing, and the folks stuck in the entry-level cub reporter jobs at other local media outlets are growing older with it, entering middle age themselves. People who haven't sniffed a promotion in years aren't in a position to call someone else a "failure."
4:09: Yes, if somebody looks at Google Maps, they can see the cloverleaf interchanges up and down 28. Unlike us, Virginia has been building for the future.
The "Second Crossing" would not "bring the Bethesda area closer to Dulles". Buy yourself a fucking map, Birdbrain.
And when was the last time you rose above the level of an "entry-level cub reporter " or "sniffed a promotion", Dyer?
Is that you, Bully George, or one of his staffers?
8:47: A direct highway to Dulles would - duh! - bring us closer to Dulles, dumbass.
I rose above the level of cub reporter when I built a network of local news sites that literally remade the hyperlocal media landscape in Montgomery County.
Then what happened?
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