MTA on State Investigation of Apple Grand Central Terminal Deal: 'Bring It On'

[klrobinson999]

"Bring it On"?

Is this kindergarten or two government agencies acting professionally? Lord!

I never like sweetheart deals, since the public ALWAYS loses. Just ask North Carolina and all those jobs created by that new Apple data center...
ALL 50 of them!

 

[Macbmw]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

When somebody has $80 billion in cash, everyone wants a piece of the pie.

 

[imageWIS]

MTA got the sweetheart deal in all this -- though if the store does well for Apple then it will be mutually beneficial. The sad thing is that MTA will likely mismanage the money and train fares will still go up.

Yup.

 

[Thunderhawks]

"Bring it On"?

Is this kindergarten or two government agencies acting professionally? Lord!

I never like sweetheart deals, since the public ALWAYS loses. Just ask North Carolina and all those jobs created by that new Apple data center...
ALL 50 of them!

Still puzzled why some people see this as a sweetheart deal and can't do the math:

9 years left on a cheap lease with some space allegedly unsellable
Replace that 9 years with a 10 year lease at a higher rate, rent the previously unusable space, add improvements paid for by Apple, get more traffic for everybody etc. etc.

In the end if Apple says I'll look some place else they still have the old 9 year cheaper lease.

Just what is in the interest of the public.

Those who are complaining about no bidding going on for the space, how about this scenario:

You have an idea (Apple to buy out the current lease and open a store)
You present your idea and concept to the MTA

MTA likes it and now say, thank you for the idea we'll offer it to everybody now to get some bids. Really the way to do business?

Also, which other major company thought of this or could occupy the space with the same impact?

 

[Liquorpuki]

Those who are complaining about no bidding going on for the space, how about this scenario:

You have an idea (Apple to buy out the current lease and open a store)
You present your idea and concept to the MTA

MTA likes it and now say, thank you for the idea we'll offer it to everybody now to get some bids. Really the way to do business?

If you're the government, that's the only way you can do business. Because if you don't offer the space up publicly, you have no way of knowing if some other company might've come in and offered twice as much as Apple. If you do, and nobody can outbid Apple or nobody else bites, then you and the taxpayers know you're getting the best deal possible.

And contrary to what some are saying on the board, there WAS bidding for the property. There are plenty of articles out there that mention it.

 

[BC2009]

According to what I read, buying off the other tenant WAS part of the contract that went out for bid.

Good link -- i had not seen that story. I had previously assumed that Apple approached the restaurant owner first, but it seems he was planning to close either way. It is strange that somebody planning to close on July 1 which would have meant he would have owed the MTA a large sum of money for early-exit on his lease.

I'd love to know the reason for the "negotiations breakdown" though. I have a feeling what happened is the first time around, the MTA couldn't legally award the contract to Apple (maybe some other bidder slipped through and gave a better offer), so they canceled it. Then maybe they rewrote it, added a few more line items that only Apple could fulfill, and put it out for bid again.

Yeah... I'd like to know why negotiations broke down in February too. I think maybe MTA was asking too much and Apple walked away knowing the position they were in. Who knows.

 

[firewood]

I would say $100,000 per year should be good enough for any public sector job aside form those listed above and that is assuming there are absolutely no other benefits. How much do you need to live anyway?

You forgot about supply and demand.

How much anyone needs to live is complete irrelevant.

An executive with experience often can get a job elsewhere. As long as there is a supply of other places competing for those execs, either you roughly match those offers, or put up with inexperienced executives running a large organization. Occasionally that works out. But usually the results can be quite ugly (e.g. college kid takes over dad's organization and runs it into the ground.)

 

[Thunderhawks]

If you're the government, that's the only way you can do business. Because if you don't offer the space up publicly, you have no way of knowing if some other company might've come in and offered twice as much as Apple. If you do, and nobody can outbid Apple or nobody else bites, then you and the taxpayers know you're getting the best deal possible.

And contrary to what some are saying on the board, there WAS bidding for the property. There are plenty of articles out there that mention it.

Good if it was bid out. I still think that if somebody has an idea that gets you a lot of money that should be honored.
Otherwise why not just go where business partners behave fairly?

I understand the government uses a bid system, but in this case probably easy as there was nobody else with a deal offering like this.

Also, any criticism about this deal is misguided just by the numbers.

People who always have the attitude that big corporations who "have the money" should be milked to the last drop, forget that these large corporations know how to get that money back.

Either via higher prices, tax breaks/ incentives and then some.

Selling 1 million of anything and adding $ 1 to $ 3 to a retail price is enough to cover things.

 

[Abazigal]

Good if it was bid out. I still think that if somebody has an idea that gets you a lot of money that should be honored.
Otherwise why not just go where business partners behave fairly?

I understand the government uses a bid system, but in this case probably easy as there was nobody else with a deal offering like this.

Also, any criticism about this deal is misguided just by the numbers.

People who always have the attitude that big corporations who "have the money" should be milked to the last drop, forget that these large corporations know how to get that money back.

Either via higher prices, tax breaks/ incentives and then some.

Selling 1 million of anything and adding $ 1 to $ 3 to a retail price is enough to cover things.

Amen to that. My govt did just that, and we are paying the price right now in the form of higher pricetags on everything by the shopowners who need to cover their rent.