Your Ad Here, on a Fire Truck? Broke Cities Sell Naming Rights

Selling advertising or naming rights in schools, on city infrastructure and other municipally owned property to make up for huge budget deficits is not a new thing. We have spoken about it before on this site and the numbers quoted in the NY times article for which this post is put up, speak to the pathetic revenue stream that can be found through these types of deals. $4 million over 20 years to rename a a massive transfer hub subway station? Thats 200k a year without inflation factored in. With a total yearly operating budget well over hundreds of millions of dollars, this amounts to a getting a few cents off on your meal at Per Se. If these deals were about budget balancing, our officials would do a much better job of bargaining for a fair deal when they sell off our valuable assets to what seems like the lowest bidder. It is nothing but insulting to be told that the wholesale price tags attached to our urban infrastructure are settled with the public interest in mind.

"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. Cleveland recently named its new Bus Rapid Transit system the HealthLine after it received $6.25 million over 25 years from the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals."

VIA The New York Times

A KFC Fire Hydrant in Brazil

BALTIMORE — 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. More [HERE]