TOWN OF CLAY, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — After months of meetings, votes and approvals, the warehouse proposed to be built on Morgan Road is all but a done deal.
As Central New York waits to hear if the operating tenant will be Amazon, a new report explores the negative effects the company has on the communities where it puts its warehouses.
The Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research organization, investigated Amazon’s impact on its employees and the communities in which their warehouses operate.
The report claims that “Amazon’s trucking operations in 2018 created $642 million in uncompensated public costs.” The co-author, speaking with NewsChannel 9’s Andrew Donovan, says that the roads and bridges of Los Angeles are being damaged by Amazon trucks more quickly than they’re fixed.
On average, the research reads, for every $1 paid in wages by Amazon, the warehouse workers require $0.24 in public benefits. That’s more than $5,000 every year, per employee, of money paid by local taxpayers to offset the Amazon workers’ wages and benefits.
An unrelated report, released Monday, investigates the alarmingly high number of injuries that happen to workers inside Amazon’s warehouses. An article, published by The Atlantic reports: “Now an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the company’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.”
A spokesperson for Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon, who supports the warehouse project in Clay, writes NewsChannel 9: “A tenant has not been named and as has been the case previously, the County Executive isn’t going to speculate or comment on what are just hypotheticals at this point.”
Earlier this month, the Clay Town Board approved a zoning change for the Liverpool Golf and Country Club from a golf course to an industrial area, so Texas-based Developer Trammell Crow can build the distribution center, promising a minimum of 1,000 jobs.
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