It's the end of the line for a joint Detroit-Windsor bid to host a new Amazon headquarters in North America. The media giant is out with its shortlist of 20 cities and Detroit is not on it. The only Canadian city on the list is Toronto.
Detroit-Windsor was just one bid out of 238 towns, cities and jurisdictions across Canada, the U-S and Mexico which submitted a bid last week to the online giant.
Speaking to AM800 News - Mayor Drew Dilkens says he's proud of the bid.
"I really believe we can take the document and business case that we have in Detroit and Windsor and use that work that's been done," says Dilkens. "And although it wasn't Amazon this time, I think there are other prospects down the road that we can pursue where the business case is equally strong."
He's remaining postive about the experience.
"When all of the facts and all of the information was reduced to writing in the form of a document and it talked about the strengths of the Detroit-Windsor partnership and what we have to document. We could take that document and we could simply subsitute Amazon and put any other tech company name and make a very compelling business case to those other tech companies," says Dilkens.
Amazon
He says officials hope to learn a lot from Amazon's debrief about what should be done differently.
"Kind of tell us what we could have done better, what they were looking for. And I expect that that conversation will be have over time here, and once we get that information we can go back, we'll reflect on our submission, we'll reflect on areas we may be able to strengthen."
Amazon wants to invest close to $5-billion over 15 years in its new headquarters, creating up to 50,000 new jobs.
In a statement released to the media, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says its bid brought out the very best of the city and our region.
He is incredibly proud of the proposal that was submitted and would like to thank Dan Gilbert, the Governor, County Executives, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens and the entire bid team for the extraordinary effort in a short period of time.
"We learned a great deal from this process and it was a very valuable experience," he says. "We are going to keep building on the progress we've made and keep pursuing major developments."
Duggan expects the lessons learned will make the region more successful on a number of other major potential investments that they are currently pursuing.
He ends his statement by saying, "We're going right back to work today to work on those other projects."