Dear Amazon decision makers,

So who doesn't know by now that you are running the biggest casting call ever known for locating a corporate headquarters, promising to bring to the lucky host community 50,000 jobs and billions in investment?

No wonder, then, that the list of state and municipal skirt hikers is very long — pretty much every major metropolitan area in the country, east to west, north to south. Canadians are in it, too.

No doubt a lot of generous enticements will materialize before your Oct. 19 deadline for submissions to host your HQ2. There's a lot of shopping ahead in your future.

I am sorry to say official Connecticut responses are coming from just about everywhere in the state except eastern Connecticut. That's the way it works here. We are last on everyone's list, especially Gov. Dannel Malloy's.

Officialdom right here is slow, too, on the uptake in pursuing offers like yours. Indeed, there has not been an official peep anywhere around here about your offer, not a single public conversation that I know of.

We are engaged here instead in a quixotic campaign, financed with some of a wasteful $30 million pot of money from a state that is dead broke, to lure as-yet-unidentified entrepreneurs here.

This gimmick, Thames River Innovation Place, includes as much jargon in its mission statement as its title. There are subprograms, like Community Concierge, that is supposed to connect newcomers to the region to the arts and culture opportunities. FYI: This newspaper publishes a weekly arts calendar.

I don't have a lot of confidence, either, in the region's redevelopment agencies. The one in Preston gave away the store to a neighboring Indian tribe, fingers crossed that the tribe might entice someone else to develop and pay for amusements — ones they can't afford, themselves — that might draw players to its competition-challenged casino. There are no takers on the horizon.

The redevelopment agency in New London still is managed, in part, all these years later, by the people in charge of vacating and tearing down an entire taxpaying neighborhood.

There is some perky talk about progress in development on the long-vacant land, but there are still no bulldozers in sight after all this time.

A big retailer like yourself would know enough to restock the shelves.

Let me be the first to suggest that you couldn't choose better for your Amazon HQ2 than eastern Connecticut.

It is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful regions of the country. Even today, in early October, there are people on our beaches, enjoying warm breezes over the now-glistening bodies of water that lap our shores. Fall colors are lighting up. Worry not, though, because our winters are surprisingly mild for New England.

We have the best maritime museum in the country, which helps celebrate our long relationship with ships and the sea. We have excellent arts museums and extraordinary parks and nature preserves.

One of your asks in the request for proposals is that the host for the headquarters be a major metropolitan area. We miss that one, but we are indeed about equally located between two major ones: New York and Boston.

You asked for mass transit. Amtrak's Northeast Corridor runs smack through the region, and regional commuter rail service would only improve if you came.

You asked for easy, commutable suburbs. We can do better than that. Our suburbs are more rural than traditional suburban, quintessential New England countryside and villages, close at hand and without commuting traffic.

We have a local airport with tower, and international airports are just on the outskirts of your distance specifications, but almost as accessible as most in congested metropolitan areas.

You didn't mention a deep water port. But we have an excellent one.

So, I would invite you to discard the applicants suggesting places where Amazon HQ2 would get lost in the shuffle, the New Yorks, Chicagos and Denvers.

Never mind the pitches you will get from Hartford and Bridgeport. None of the rest of the state could welcome your employees as well as eastern Connecticut and provide them with such an engaging environment, with both urban and rural appeal.

As you look at the options, try clicking on eastern Connecticut and roll over the images to enlarge. You'll like it.

And never mind you weren't officially invited.

You would be very welcome.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com