What’s in a name? Sask. town looking to find out by selling naming rights to highest bidder
CBC
A small Saskatchewan town is looking for a new moniker and hoping to get some much-needed funds in the process.
The town of Duck Lake, about 80 kilometers northeast of Saskatoon, is accepting expressions of interest for its naming rights, with the minimum bid set at $10 million.
“We’re putting the name of the town up for sale — just the name,” said Mayor Jason Anderson.
He said interested parties would be buying the permanent naming rights.
“Their name would be on GPS. It would be on all the maps. It would be on The Weather Network,” he said, “That’s not just in Saskatchewan. I mean, that’s worldwide.”
He said the town hopes a corporation or someone who wants “to leave a legacy behind for their whole family” will put in an offer and capitalize on Duck Lake’s high-traffic location between Saskatoon and Prince Albert.
“We have about 6,000 vehicles a day that are driving by on Highway 11,” he said, “Is that worth something for anybody? Who knows?”
Anderson said the money would be used for upgrading the town’s infrastructure. It needs new water and sewer lines, an undertaking that he said recently cost a neighbouring municipality close to $10 million.
Since most provincial funding is tied to population, Anderson said asking the provincial government for more money to put toward the infrastructure project is not an option. Duck Lake has a population of about 580 people.
Anderson said he got the idea to sell the town's naming rights before he was elected, after reading about a stadium in the United States selling naming rights for 20 years at $35 million a year.
Anderson said he considered the town’s skating rink and town hall, but knew the buildings would not fetch the same amount. He started thinking bigger.
The town council approved selling the town’s naming rights in a narrow 3-2 vote.
Anderson said town residents were not consulted ahead of time in order to keep copycat municipalities from beating Duck Lake “to the punch.”
“If we were to have discussed this with locals and if this was to have gotten out and any other community actually got ahold of this, before we had made a decision, well, would they have [gone] ahead with it?” he said.
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