Thermoformer another winner in blockbuster Amazon deal

The mega-deal to bring half of Amazon's second headquarters to New York's Long Island City will allow the $800 billion tech giant to reap a windfall of tax breaks and credits in return for hiring at least 25,000 workers.

It will also likely yield a jackpot for Plaxall Inc., a thermoformer founded by the late Louis Pfohl that owns two large sites that Amazon will build on to create roughly half of its planned 20-acre headquarters. The parcels surround Anable Basin on the Long Island City waterfront in Queens.

It wasn't immediately clear whether Plaxall is selling the sites or leasing them to the tech company, nor how much it could receive. State and city officials said that Amazon's deal with Plaxall was being privately arranged between the two parties and was separate from the transaction Amazon struck to lease city-owned land next to the Plaxall sites.

But beyond the headquarters deal, Plaxall appears to be getting another huge perk: A third site owned by the company that borders the planned Amazon campus, but is not part of it, will be included in the state-controlled process to rezone the sites to permit large-scale development and allow Plaxall to avoid City Council review and community input

By inserting the third site, which is located between 46th Avenue and 46th Road, in the state's so-called general project plan for Amazon's headquarters, Plaxall can avoid having to rezone the roughly 2-acre parcel through a city review. It had already planned to apply for rezoning to build thousands of apartments on the three sites.

According to a document released to Crain's New York Business by a Plaxall spokesman describing the company's plans, Plaxall now is seeking permission in the state's general project plan for the headquarters to build over 500,000 square feet of residential space on the site or up to 800,000 square feet of commercial space.

On its website, Plaxall refers to its hopes for Anabal Basin: "From this long-overlooked inlet will flow a vibrant, mixed-use community — a home for longtime [Long Island City] residents as well as newcomers hoping for their own opportunity to call the neighborhood home."

The company says it works with the medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, food and retail industries, with clamshell packaging, point-of-purchase displays and items such as syringe trays and pharmaceutical blister packs.

A spokeswoman for the city's Economic Development Corp., which helped negotiate the headquarters deal with Amazon, said that if Plaxall sought to build residential on the site, it would still be compelled to reserve between 25 percent to 30 percent of the development for affordable housing — in compliance with the city's mandatory inclusionary housing requirements.

The general project plan structure has attracted criticism, including from Long Island City's Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, because it will allow the state to bypass the City Council to rezone the sites for millions of square feet of new office space. Both state and city officials have pointed out that general project plans have been used several times in the past for large scale development, such as building a sports arena over the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, towering office buildings at the World Trade Center, and a large expansion of Columbia University's headquarters in Upper Manhattan. The officials also state that the general project plan process will allow for community input.

The inclusion of Plaxall's third site into the general project plan could add a layer of controversy, however, since it appears to be a bold-faced perk for the company without a direct connection to the Amazon headquarters project.

"For the city to agree to take any portion of the Plaxall sites and include them in the general project plan when they don't even include Amazon is an outrage," said Van Bramer. "They know it lacks community support and support from elected officials. That's the bottom line here." Van Bramer added that the area cannot support thousands of new residential units "when we have an infrastructure crisis already."