Cash-strapped Fairfax County is exploring how it can sell naming rights to its many parks and sports fields, hoping to capitalize on corporate sponsorships to buttress its sagging budget.
It’s unlikely the county would bring the program to bear in time to meet its fiscal 2011 budget, which faces a $315 million shortfall.
But parks officials are looking for a company that can catalog county facilities with the potential for selling ads or naming rights, estimate what those sales might be worth, and formulate a marketing strategy, said Nick Duray, manager of marketing services for the Fairfax County Park Authority.
The county is looking as far afield as Oregon for examples of how such a sponsorship agreement might work, Duray said. The town of Medford last year sold the naming rights of a park to U.S. Cellular for $650,000 as part of a six-year agreement.
“You can find a couple of examples of people that are successful, and a whole litany of places that say they’d like to do it and nothing ever happens,” Duray said.
The proposal will be delicate in a county that deeply values its more than 24,000 acres of parkland. Braddock District Supervisor John Cook, who has suggested the Park Authority explore the idea of selling naming rights, suggested that the concept could be limited to individual facilities within parks, and perhaps not entire facilities.
“If somebody proposed to rename Lake Accotink Park the ‘Bob Smith Park,’ I think some people might say ‘Gee, I’m not sure we want to do that,’ ” Cook said. The idea is unprecedented in Fairfax, which is struggling to come up with new revenue amid a sharp downturn in real estate taxes. The county toyed with the idea of establishing new fees for some its most popular parks during budget talks earlier this year before scrapping the idea.
