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…one piece at a time.

I wasn’t surprised the other day when I learned that the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) is planning to sell the naming rights to the Euclid Corridor. In this age where everything from the hood of a race car to the sleeve of your favorite athlete is adorned with a corporate logo, naming a bus route seems fairly appropriate. Appropriate that is unless you live in the community where the bus service runs or (perhaps even more importantly) want to direct a non-resident on the intricacies of our local public transportation service.

Normally, I’m the last person to criticize leveraging our public assets in favor of benefiting our community, but I also believe that the benefit needs to be significant enough to make the change worthwhile. In the case of this plan by RTA, no price tag has been placed on the value of the Euclid Corridor’s naming rights and it’s proposed benefit - replacing the advertising on bus sides and tails - seems limited at best.

Sure it’s hard to determine the salable value of such an asset, but by refusing to set a minimum price, the local politicians and unelected bureaucrats that run the Authority are creating a fire sale opportunity here in Cleveland. Suppose for a moment that the corridor only gets a high bid of $250,000 - what kind of impact would that have on the sale of future naming rights for other publicly-held fixtures? Would Burke Lakefront fetch a measly $50,000? What about the Emerald Necklace? Or the Cleveland MetroParks Zoo? Is Cleveland City Hall far behind (although knowing the

brainiacs in city government, I can see the Jackson administration leading the way on PAYING Forest City to take on the name… think about it, Ken Silliman telling the Finance Department, “yeah, make the check out to Forest City Enterprises. I know the total’s $100,000, but they said we could pay in installments.”).

As for replacing the four-wheeled billboard aspects of the current RTA-visage, do you really care? My understanding is that the advertising brings in revenue that is meant to offset the cost of ridership. My understanding also is that the RTA continues to hemorrhage money, so why in the world would we get rid of a revenue stream? Why not instead enhance the revenue stream by keeping the ads?

Finally the geographic legacy of our community and the simplicity associated with calling the corridor what it is - The Euclid Corridor (instead of perhaps the “Wolstein, DDR, Forest City, Bob Stark, insert name of whoever’s partnering with John Carney today Corridor”) helps to maintain the ever-shrinking sense of place that our community leaders seem deadset on helping to erode.

If RTA wants to do this right, they should do the following:

• Set a minimum price for the right to rename the corridor. That price should be sufficient enough to LOWER the cost of ridership and DECREASE the amount of public subsidy the Authority currently receives. If no bidder meets that price, don’t sell.
• Keep the bus advertising - it provides a low cost vehicle (no pun intended) for advertising and it helps lower the cost of ridership.
• Whatever the result of this renaming fiasco, keep “Euclid Corridor” as the primary part of the name. You can sell the naming rights to Preparation H for all I care, just make sure it’s called the “Euclid Corridor presented by Preparation H” or the “Preparation H Euclid Corridor“.
  

In the end (ooouuwww bad metaphor) it’ll probably be called the Cleveland Clinic Corridor - in which case the Clinic will probably request some additional tax advantages and we’ll all get a little poorer (or taking it in the rear so to speak) as the city claims to be getting better - but that’s for another time.