Have they answered where do the 25,000 jobs go now?
Seeing as the state controls the incentives and the governor and mayor were on board, there was a decent chance they would have gotten the incentives no matter what local opposition was, and eventually the issue would have been dropped. For incentives totaling billions, it's difficult to imagine them dropping the whole thing over some heated meetings with councilpeople and union leaders.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the incentives and subsidies were coming from the state, not the city. Cuomo and many majority Democrats in the state Senate were on board. The mayor, DeBlasio was on board.
The opposition was driven locally by councilpeople and community activists. Some in state government opposed but I doubt it would have been enough to derail it, especially considering upstate cities have had similar blockbuster subsidy deals given to them (Albany with IBM/nanotech, Buffalo with Tesla/Solar City).
It seems like Amazon would be driven to withstand some (likely temporary) public criticism in order to get billions of dollars of incentives. After all, they already faced the same criticism during the HQ2 spectacle and have a lot of same type of backlash in their hometown to begin with.
Makes me wonder if there's another story playing out that the public has not heard yet.
Right before the Amazon pull out, there were several meetings between Amazon, labour/union reps, and government officials (according to NPR). It's all a black box, but my guess is that either the unions or Amazon wanted some sort of contractual guarantee the other was unwilling to budge on, and the local governance sided with the unions.
If New York was willing to give $3 billion to Amazon, maybe New York can now use that money to hire 25,000 workers.
New York was effectively giving Amazon coupons for X% off its New York tax bill. When your local grocery store sends you its weekly ad, and it says “over $500 in savings inside,” do you believe you can walk into the store with the coupons and demand $500 in cash? You may do that, but you should expect a heavy police response. Coupons simply help drive business that the entity issuing them would otherwise not have.
It's not at all clear that New York would come out ahead on this deal, given the infrastructure costs and Amazon's well known tendency to avoid paying taxes.
Anyway, it’s a moot point. They aren’t going there, and either are the jobs and (discounted) tax revenue that they would have brought with them. If you consider that a win, then you have indeed “won”.
There is no shortage of business and people in the sectors Amazon is a part of in NYC, and coming to NYC.
In no way is it the same thing. This comment and the tweet he linked to indicate that they believed the money was being paid to Amazon soon, and that because Amazon has backed out, that money can now be spent on government projects. That is just factually incorrect. The money does not and will not exist - it was an estimate of tax savings had the deal gone through.