Amazon jobs in Madison MS will be more than announced

Amazon Web Services Economic Development Director Roger Wehner told a collection of students, faculty and staff at Millsaps College on Wednesday that previously announced investment figures for two new hyperscale development center campuses will be just the tip of the iceberg.

Wehner made those comments as part of the Millsaps' Tech Week programs.

Amazon Web Services made big news in January when it announced it will occupy two Madison County locations for the historic buildout for hyperscale development centers.

Mississippi lawmakers completed a $259 million incentive package for the Amazon Web Services $10 billion project in Canton and Madison County.

Gov. Tate Reeves said the project represents the single largest corporate capital investment in state history. Amazon Web Services will build two sites, one a 927-acre site and the other a 786-acre site for two hyperscale data centers.

However, Wehner said Amazon expects to invest much more when all is said and done.

"We were lucky to find Mississippi," Wehner told the audience at Millsaps. "Let me make one thing clear, all of the news articles say we are going to invest $10 billion dollars. That's actually not true. That is our minimum public commitment. We are going to invest far more than $10 billion. Rest assured it will be tens of billions of dollars."

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Wehner also said the 1,000 jobs announced with the project in January is also a false number.

"There will be far more than 1,000 jobs," he said. "That's just a number we cannot fall below based on our negotiations. There will be a lot more than 1,000 jobs."

He said that construction in Madison County will go on for the next 5-to-7 years.

"There won't be this flurry of manufacturing and then construction jobs go away," Wehner said. "We will build on both sites simultaneously as needed as we go along. That means we are continuously under construction. So, the thousands of construction jobs. There will be thousands of construction jobs and billions of dollars that will be invested in your community is the No. 1 benefit of us going to a community. We literally will drive a big segment of the economy. … This money will ripple through the local economy."

In January, Reeves said that once open, the centers will hire 1,000 employees making an average annual salary of about $60,000 per year.

Wehner said that average annual salary for people working at AWS Mississippi will begin at around $80,000.

As for the state incentive package, the legislature approved appropriating $44 million, $32 million of which will go to training grants and educational opportunities, and the rest will go to site development assistance.

The three bills also approved loaning Madison County $215.1 million to assist with infrastructure, including road work, water and sewer lines and also $13 million for a new fire station near the plants. That loan will be paid back through fee-in-lieu agreements with Amazon.

The project also received sales-and-use tax emptions for equipment, 10-year corporate income tax exemptions, among others. However, if the company fails to meet certain hiring or investment benchmarks, the state could take back sales and use tax, as well as corporate income tax breaks.

Madison County Schools

While there are tax breaks for AWS in the deal with the State of Mississippi, Wehner was quick to point out that Amazon is not a company relaying on corporate welfare from the government.

"Let me be clear about this, we are the largest tax payer in every jurisdiction we are in. That's a fact," Wehner said. "In fact, our modeling currently predicts that for the school systems in Madison County, we will double their revenues in the first year. So, whatever the current budget is for Madison County schools, there will be a two-x factor in a year and a half or two years."

He said that in Loudoun County and Prince William County in northern Virginia, two of the wealthiest counties in America, AWS provides 51% of their tax revenues for their schools systems.

"They have the highest-paid teachers in America, and we are providing the tax base for that," Wehner said. "We take very seriously our partnership in the communities that we serve. We want our communities to grow from an educational perspective and from a workforce development perspective."

Why Mississippi?

Since January's announcement of AWS commitment to Mississippi and Madison County, Wehner has been bombarded with questions as to why the company would locate there.

"There were other states that couldn't believe what little Mississippi did," Wehner said. "What Mississippi did that beat out everybody else … In Mississippi, there was complete alignment between Entergy Mississippi, the legislature, the governor and regulators."

He said it also helped that Madison County Economic Development Authority has done its homework over the last several years and were prepared when the opportunity arose.

"They all worked together and were able to remove the bureaucratic inefficiencies," he said. "If they had not done that, Mississippi would not have won. But Mississippi did and Mississippi won. There are states out there that don't want to do it and don't have the will to do it and couldn't get all the pieces put in place to do it. In Mississippi, it was a joint effort."

He said Mississippi proved to be "nimble."

"It was about about speed to market and Mississippi did a ton of things that others did not and they struck an incredibly sound deal," Wehner said. "They did everything that needed to be done, protected the rate payers, made the right decisions. They just took the slowness out of it. That was incredibly important."

Education outside Madison County

While the project is in Madison County, Wehner said the plan is to provide educational opportunities throughout the Metro area, specifically in Jackson.

"We are going to do the same educational programs outside of Madison County that we do in Madison," he said. "Our goal is to push out farther. We know that the more people we empower with the knowledge of how to work at AWS, the better everyone is, including us. We know that the drive time in Mississippi is around 60 minutes. So, we want to expand to Jackson and even farther."

Ross Reily can be reached by email at rreily@gannett.com or 601-573-2952. You can follow him on Twitter @GreenOkra1.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Amazon jobs in Madison MS will be more than announced