A volunteer-run group tasked by the City of Vancouver to analyze its budget is suggesting the city generate revenue from city assets through selling naming rights and running sponsorship campaigns.
- “Vancouver Mayor’s Budget Task Force recommends selling naming rights to increase cash flow”. Isabella Zavarise. 2024-01-24T03:45Z. CTV News Vancouver (https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-mayor-s-budget-task-force-recommends-selling-naming-rights-to-increase-cash-flow-1.6739602)
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Sponsorship I can get behind; naming rights has always seemed like a bad idea.
I do think that city-owned assets should be properly labelled though, and putting a “maintenance of this made possible by sponsorship of xyz” on a plaque makes sense to me. But sponsorship should be a subscription, not a one time payment.
When you build it yourself you get to name it. When it’s city (public) money you don’t.
Sonsorship subscriptions are fine though. I’d even suggest that a certain portion must be set aside in a fund that generates interest or investment revenue.
putting a “maintenance of this made possible by sponsorship of xyz” on a plaque makes sense to me. But sponsorship should be a subscription, not a one time payment.
An important thing to add to this, I think, is that it’s important that the sponsorship has no final say in the direction, or management of the asset. It should just be treated as an advertising/philanthropic opportunity for the sponsor.
One concern that I do have is over-reliance and dependence on the sponsor. It would not be great to have a situation where the City is beholden to some corporation.
Remember when “sell-out” was a slur like “flip-flopper”?
The guy must think himself a genius
Because of this post, I took a look at the budget report. One of the things they mention rolling out is a AI-centric AP system. Nowadays everything that has to do with technology needs to have the word AI in it My guess what most of this system would do is automate tasks to minimize error. I doubt generative AI is a good investment for an AP system.
