Moose Jaw City council couldn’t do it themselves, and now they’ll find a partner to help them with naming rights to their downtown events centre.
The place that will only be known as Mosaic Place for the next couple of months will be renamed.
Council Monday approved spending $29,000 plus a 20 per cent commission to a company called Performance Sponsorship Group, that will seek out a naming rights sponsor.
Council approved the spending in a 5-2 vote, with Couns. Dawn Luhning and Kim Robinson opposing.
While the city would like to get a deal done before too long, Mayor Clive Tolley said the city’s iconic old rink, the Moose Jaw Civic Centre, was known as the Crushed Can.
“So it’s not the end of the world if we don’t get a naming rights sponsor,” said Tolley. “It seems to be in vogue for large corporations to want to put their name on the building, and we would appreciate the opportunity to do that with somebody and put their name on the building.”
Tolley isn’t concerned about the Aug. 31 end of Mosaic Place being known as that name. He also said he is ok with the idea of not starting the re-naming process with the company sooner.
“I think we did our due diligence,” he said. “We tried to find somebody and we weren’t successful. We’ve admitted that to ourselves. We’ve gone back to council and said ‘We need to turn this over to somebody else and let them have a kick at it.”
The $29,000 and 20 per cent commission they’ll be paying to Performance Sponsorship Group was the lowest of three bids submitted.
Mosaic was the first sponsor of the downtown events centre, as it was originally referred, in 2011 shortly after its construction. A sponsorship agreement of originally 10 years was extended to an 11th to help ease the transition. That 11th year will expire August 31.
While the plan this year was to see if any local or provincial companies wanted the rights, those efforts by a renaming committee came up effectively fruitless.
“We certainly don’t want to keep contacting local companies,” Puffalt said. “We had really good interest in local companies but when it came down to it, they really didn’t want to move forward. So I don’t think there’s any point to keep contacting local companies. I think that just irritates people.”
Councillors and city administration were effusive in their statements about Mosaic, thanking them for their sponsorship over the last 11 years. Council said Mosaic were going to be spending the same amount of money in Moose Jaw but focusing their efforts on food security.
