Saskatoon may have a bridge to sell you — in name, at least

Saskatoon city council wants to find a new way to come up with with names for city bridges. Proposed options include naming bridges by geographical location, or holding a public contest. 

But Saskatoon city councillor Troy Davies says he has a better idea: just sell the naming rights for new city bridges.

The full interview is available in the audio player above. The following portions have been edited for clarity and length. 

Make the case for us. Why do you think Saskatoon should sell off the naming rights for city bridges? 

Basically, it comes down to money, money, money - and that's kind of where I'm going with this... Saskatoon, we're going to go into probably I'd say the toughest year that we've seen in at least the last five years. We've been living in this "Saskaboom" type thing, so we need to look at different ways of doing things. The number one thing that's come up in our master recreation plan here in Saskatoon — and it's something I've been very vocal about in the last three years — is hockey rinks in our city....it's been identified that we are short on hockey rinks. The only way that this stuff happens is private donation dollars or a direct mill rate increase to taxpayers' dollars. So I'm just trying to find different ways to raise money without raising taxes, and this is one thing that came forward. 

Now, there's been talk of holding a public contest to choose new names. What's wrong with that? 

The bad thing when you have the contest - and nothing wrong with contests, and putting it forward and bringing it to council - but you have thousands of dollars in administrative [costs], and administration's going to have to vet all these names, and then at the end of the day it's going to come down to maybe five, maybe eight names that come forward to us. Right now, I could name 15 municipal, provincial, First Nations, sport icons names that we should be naming bridges after that have done a lot for our community. But at the end of the day, if we go this route, we're only going to name one - so there's going to be nine others that walk away from council thinking that they didn't make the cut. 

How much money do you think you could get for bridge naming rights? 

Naming something in our community is not something new. We've named parks in the past from private businesses - PotashCorp Playland is one example that we have downtown here in Saskatoon. Our major hockey centre in Saskatoon has been sold to SaskTel, so it's called the SaskTel Centre... We've got a performing arts theatre that's called TCU Place, named after TCU Financial, so this isn't something new... The number I came up with is 10 million dollars over 30 years, and then at the same time, the rinks that you build, they get their permanent name on those rinks - just to have some incentive there for corporations who might want to step up. 

How do you respond to the argument that some things just shouldn't be sold, that [selling] the names of major city infrastructure like bridges is a step too far? 

I can totally see other people's point of view on this. For me personally, my bottom line is I need to look at different ways of doing business to ensure that our mill rate doesn't go up. I represent a lot of older communities in our west side of Saskatoon, where a lot of people are on their pensions and they can't afford a seven per cent increase on mill rate, so that's kind of where I'm coming from. 

Click the blue button above to listen to the full interview.