Amazon, Georgia: If you name it, will company come?
Officials from a recently incorporated city outside Atlanta want to shed some of their new municipality's land and rename it Amazon, Georgia, in the hopes it will spur the e-commerce giant to locate a second headquarters there.
The Stonecrest City Council voted 4-2 on Monday to de-annex 345 acres (140 hectares) of land and to ask the Georgia General Assembly to use it to form the city of Amazon, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported .
"How could you not want your 21st century headquarters to be located in a city named Amazon?" asked Stonecrest Mayor Jason Lary.
Amazon has said it will spend more than $5 billion to build a second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, in North America with as many as 50,000 jobs. The Seattle-based company said it's looking at metropolitan areas with populations of more than a million people, which have the potential to attract top technical talent.
Stonecrest officials plan to submit a bid for Amazon's HQ2 by the company's Oct. 19 deadline. The company expects to make a decision next year.
Stonecrest is located 20 miles (30 kilometers) east of Atlanta, and is home to about 53,000 residents. It incorporated as a city this year.