Tax incentives are good for Amazon. What about the local economy?
Amazon's most visible presence in Illinois in 2015 was the stream of brown boxes it shipped to customers' doorsteps.
Three years later, the company has 10,000 full-time Illinois employees, a corporate office and bookstore in Chicago, and 17 supply chain facilities across the state, including nine distribution centers with a collective footprint bigger than all 110 floors at Willis Tower.
In exchange, Amazon received state tax incentive deals potentially worth millions of dollars linked to the openings of distribution centers in Aurora, Joliet and Monee.
Skeptics urge agencies offering incentives to carefully weigh the costs and benefits due to the uncertainty over how much fulfillment centers really boost the local economy - or whether incentives are truly needed, given Amazon's push to build out its distribution network and shorten delivery times. That advice holds true for another Amazon project likely to draw offers of much larger sums: the company's planned second headquarters, which 20 cities and regions - including the Chicago area - are competing to land.
But economic development officials in towns Amazon now calls home say the warehouses lining Illinois highways deserve more credit for adding jobs, bringing in
