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June 26, 2012
Your Ad Here, on a Fire Truck? Broke Cities Sell Naming Rights
The New York Times
by Michael Cooper
Speaking of still calling it Atlantic Av—Pacific St.
Should this city’s red fire trucks be transformed into rolling billboards?
After Baltimore officials made the wrenching decision to close three fire companies later this summer, the City Council initially sought to avert the cuts with a new money-raising strategy: it passed a resolution this month urging the administration to explore selling ads on the city’s fire trucks.
...Pizza chains now advertise on some school buses, as a growing number of states consider allowing school districts to sell ads. The Baltimore City Council member who wrote the legislation urging the city to sell ads on fire trucks, William Welch, said he was simply trying to find a way to help the city meet its growing needs in a time of dwindling revenues and support.
...The downturn seems to have prompted more public entities to sell advertising or auction off the naming rights of public places, said Elizabeth Ben-Ishai, the campaign coordinator for the Public Citizen’s Commercial Alert project, which works to curb the spread of commercialization. “We are bombarded by ads everywhere we go, and these are public spaces meant to be reflective of the values of our society, co-opted by the private sector,” she said.
Transit systems across the nation have been particularly aggressive in recent years in trying to sell the naming rights of stations. They are struggling with an estimated $77.7 billion shortfall just to get to a state of good repair, at a time of growing ridership, shrinking state support and budgetary shortfalls.
In Brooklyn, new signs went up last month at the Atlantic Avenue subway stop bearing a sponsored addition to its name: Barclays Center, for which the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is being paid $4 million over 20 years.
NoLandGrab: One reason transit systems are struggling so mightily is that some of them give away property for a fraction of its market value. And if corporations are the only entities that can ably pay for this stuff, perhaps we need to increase taxes on those corporations — rather than allowing them to keep the naming-rights revenue for allegedly "public" sports facilities.
Posted by eric at June 26, 2012 10:21 AM