Amidst the mayor cautioning that the North Simcoe Sports and Recreation Centre could be rebranded on a whim to the highest bidder, a policy framework for such sponsorship was introduced at a recent committee of the whole meeting.
Penned by various heads of staff, a sponsorship, advertising and charitable giving policy report was presented for council approval and pulled within the meeting agenda by Coun. Catherine MacDonald who expressed a need for clarity within its text.
The policy itself aimed to provide a system that would allow non-Midland entities to offer payment on putting their names on events or items. One example included a hypothetical realtor wanting to sponsor a dodgeball tournament or program held at the facility.
Not applicable to the policy would be town-paid advertising on its own events, programs or services, government sponsored grants applied for by Midland, transactional contracts to manage town operations, or – of relevance to many on council – naming of town assets instigated by the town.
The underfunded North Simcoe Sports and Recreation Centre had been explored by Midland council for naming rights as a solution to offset costs of running the facility at a $1.8 million annual expense to ratepayers, as well as a seeming lack of cooperation within the North Simcoe municipalities.
MacDonald had questioned staff if there were rates or guidelines as per the policy, with executive director of digital government, customer and recreation services Dana Clarke addressing a policy template provided in the report and explaining that the framework provided the guidelines.
As MacDonald narrowed questioning toward naming rights, Clarke replied: “This would be if someone wanted to give us money to name an asset like we’ve talked about on naming rights for the arena. That’s the differentiation.”
Mayor Bill Gordon offered context and clarity from his perspective.
“This isn’t about people looking for money from us to sponsor things; it’s the opposite to that,” said Gordon. “Maybe Acme Inc. wants to have their name on it (an event like Public Works Palooza) so whatever our costs are of hosting that would be offset by Acme’s sponsorship.
“One of the tasks we’ve given our CAO and senior leadership team to go through this and find all the gaps in how we’ve just been doing business kind of like cowboys for decades now. No policy – it’s just: whoever’s at the table at the time figures out how we’re going to do it, we do it.
“Which isn’t always transparent. It certainly isn’t recreatable because the names and the faces change, so does the way we do business and that’s not the way you run a town,” Gordon added.
Gordon informed council that policy frameworks were meant to be wide open for transparency, while the procedures become more granular to define the policy.
He also noted that the policy was meant to focus on inbound revenue and not outbound expense as a means to pacify concerned council members, but stated that when successfully bid on by a third party, the town would have no say as to a chosen name.
“There’s none of us getting involved with who gets picked,” said Gordon. “Sometimes you have to caution what you wish for because it could be called the Kleenex Centre or something. Whoever’s got the biggest bag of money is likely going to get their name on that building, and that’s going to help our beleaguered ratepayers.”
MacDonald asked if she was “being overly precautious with the vagueness” of the report, while questioning staff if they had looked to other municipalities for similar policies. Clarke replied that top staff, the April user fee working group, and legal staff had extensively “picked basically the best of what we had” found across Ontario for the policy.
The committee of the whole approved the policy, with ratification anticipated at an upcoming regular meeting of council.
Following the meeting, Gordon reiterated praise on staff for finding the gaps where policies hadn’t been established.
“Over this term, council has been seeing more policy coming to us than probably previous terms, because we're trying to establish this so it's more repeatable and it's the same consistent experience for anyone who approaches us, who wants to donate art or have a name on something,” Gordon explained.
When asked about the observation that Midland council members had recently stopped calling the facility by its full title in dropping the ‘North Simcoe’ aspect, Gordon admitted he hadn’t noticed doing so on purpose and that there was no purposeful intent in the wording.
“I think it’s just the vernacular we use, and we use it all interdependently,” said Gordon. “I don’t think there’s any sentiment that we’re trying to erase the name of the facility. We're just trying to capitalize on this facility that costs us so much to run, and the lack of supportive funding from our neighbours.
“We’ve got to do something. And this was the number one recommendation by the user group – not us but the user group – when we met with the users that did participate.”
The sponsorship, advertising and charitable giving policy report is available in the council agenda on the town of Midland website.
