The deal to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to Crystal City, Virginia, was finalized less than 24 hours before it was officially announced to the nation.
As of Monday morning, Stephen Moret, president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, who was negotiating with the e-commerce and web services giant on behalf of the state, still didn’t know whether Amazon would definitively bring part of its HQ2 project to Northern Virginia. This despite news reports it was already done, according to Washington Business Journal.
Moret, once the head of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber who later served as the secretary of Louisiana Economic Development before becoming president and CEO of the LSU Foundation, said he and other Virginia officials had been negotiating a memorandum of understanding over the past two weeks with Amazon, but “they never told us we had it.”
“We had the impression they were doing that in multiple places,” Moret said. “We executed the MOU at 1 p.m. Then they said they wanted to have a call.”
That call came at 2 p.m. Monday. Moret jumped on the line with Holly Sullivan, a former Montgomery County economic development official who is part of Amazon’s search team, along with Brian Ball, Virginia’s secretary of Commerce and Trade, and other state officials.
The very next afternoon, less than 24 hours after the phone call with Amazon, hundreds of business officials and media gathered for a press conference in a nondescript empty warehouse on Eads Street in Arlington—a site that will soon belong to Amazon—to announce the news.
