At the November 12 Lancaster County Convention Center Authority (LCCCA) Facilities Programming Committee meeting, NewsLanc asked whether the board has lately considered the sale of Convention Center naming rights. For the time being, LCCCA Chair Kevin Fry said, the center’s naming rights are not a pressing order of business: “Neither the board nor the staff are focusing on naming rights at all,” Fry said.
According to Fry, the LCCCA board and staff have been “working very hard to close out the construction contracts….There’s also budgeting going on at this point.” Fry also asserted that, even if the board was interested in pursuing such a revenue source, the current market would offer little promise: “We’re finding that, in some venues, naming rights are being defaulted upon,” Fry said.
According to past contractual agreements, the LCCCA would owe 50% of all naming rights proceeds to the private Penn Square Partners. Also, the LCCCA is contractually bound to grant the right of first offer to S. Dale High.
As to whether the board may seek to alter those past arrangements, Fry said, “I understand what the agreements say about the naming rights, and I personally am not in agreement with what [they] say, but, of course, we’re constrained by them—and I’m only one member of the board.” Fry added, “If the market changes and naming rights come up, we’ll bring it up and we’ll talk about them at that point.”
Kevin Molloy, Executive Director of the LCCCA, explained that selling this convention center’s name would be a poor marketing move:
“Naming rights for convention centers are not a huge thing in second tier cities, which is what we really are….And one of the things that really become a selling point in some convention centers is that the locality be a part of your name. The reason is that we have a name that is recognizable—when we say ‘Lancaster,’ people know what we’re talking about….If you use a name that doesn’t identify your location, you may have a hard time selling your venue.”
“I’m not really the biggest fan of trying to sell naming rights,” Molloy concluded, “It may hurt us in our ability to ‘sell'” the venue.
Randolph Carney, a Lancaster City resident who has closely followed the project, said that the notion of selling the center’s naming rights was introduced as part of a greater plan to close a Convention Center funding gap: “Most if not all of the features of that plan were really…a political move to make everything look good. As it turned out, your predecessors simply borrowed more money.”
Why is it that our ‘wonderful’ newspapers never report anything from these meetings?
Keep up the great work….you are the only source of reliable informative reporting we have!