Why we say we support community benefit agreements is that, as we heard earlier, there are a lot of good community benefits to pursue in the spending of public money. To use a contractual tool like a community benefit agreement to interfere with the normal dynamic of a competitive marketplace by saying to that market, “Here are the benefits that we want to pursue within this community, and we as the government select only this group to pursue it with”, in our view is just a wrong-headed manipulation of the market.
The things you gain and benefit from a competitive dynamic in a marketplace should be preserved, even as we have identified the benefits that we want to see within that community. Then you use that community benefit agreement to ensure that this list—whatever you want on that list—is achieved by the end of that project.