By Thomas Gangale
California Progress Report
14 November 2007
California's latest budget crisis is solved!
Years ago, I hated it when Candlestick Park was renamed 3Com Park. Now it's Monster Park. Sure, that makes more sense; you have to be some kind of a monster to survive the weather in the damned place. Anyway, city governments have been cutting such deals with corporations for years in order to ease their financial woes, so why couldn't the state government do the same thing by leasing the naming rights to the state's geography?
However, I wouldn't want our state to entirely prostitute its geographic identity to corporate advertising; rather, I would insist that some vestige of the original name survive from one corporate sellout to the next. If British Petroleum leased the naming rights to the Santa Barbara Channel, for instance, I wouldn't stand for them renaming it the English Channel. Bugger that! And none of this tedious 3Com Park at Candlestick Point dodge either; you Madison Avenue guys are more clever than that, and if your client's corporate name is tough to fit into this geographic scheme, well that's why you get paid the big bucks.
So, what could we do here in California? Georgia Pacific could add its name to a national forest of its choice, and that might incentivize the company to conserve the forest rather that log it, although it would be kind of weird having the name Georgia on a forest in California. The Morton Salton Sea is a no-brainer. We could have Sequoia Voting Systems National Park, unless Secretary of State Debra Bowen vigorously objects. Nestle and Hershey could compete for the Chocolate Mountains contract, but being a San Franciscan of Italian descent, I'd root for Ghirardelli.
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