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Giving Away the Store?

An advocacy group charges that the city has given billions in job-retention incentives to firms that are now laying off New Yorkers

By Cody Lyon | Updated on March 02, 2009

The spot in Lower Manhattan where Wall Street meets Broadway played host to nonprofit group Good Jobs New York’s outdoor press conference on a Wednesday morning in February. Participants called for increased transparency to public records and documents that detail deals made over the years between the city’s Industrial Development Agency and large financial giants who promised to retain or create new jobs in return for tax breaks and other sweeteners.

City Council member Eric Gioia, chair of the oversight and investigations committee along with Brooklyn council members Letitia James and David Yassky, also spokem as did Chris Keely, associate director of Common Cause New York, and Kristi Barnes from the group Jobs with Justice.

As unseasonably warm breezes blew, so too did charges that over the past 20 years, the city had provided several large houses of finance with around $2.5 billion in tax breaks and other subsidies, although some of that included 9/11 grants in Lower Manhattan. Of the current climate, they say public concerns over large infusions of cash from the federal government to Wall Street were doubly heightened in New York, where large tax breaks for many of the same firms have been negotiated and offered for 20 years.

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