The Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously on a proposal to direct Superintendent Michelle Reid to draft a plan to explore naming rights for school athletic facilities Thursday night.
Co-sponsor and At-Large member Kyle McDaniel said it’s about time the county got creative in addressing the school system’s $400 million maintenance backlog.
“This is a low-risk, high-yield, low-cost move that asks the superintendent and her team to go back, take that policy and look at how we could potentially monetize our athletic facilities, and we already do that,” McDaniel said.
“We’re basically saying, ‘OK, to the people who would pay money to put a sign on a fence of a football field, would you pay more money to put a bigger sign on the fence of a football field?’ That is it,” he said.
McDaniel said the proposal could potentially net the school system millions of dollars.
“These are all part of natural economic relationships that exist in almost every other state,” said Mount Vernon District Representative Mateo Dunne, who is also a co-sponsor of the proposal. “Fairfax County seems to be the exception rather than the norm.”
“We need to bring in more revenue sources, especially that don’t involve raising property taxes,” Dunne said.
Although the board voted to move forward with the proposal, at least one board member had concerns about how the revenue would be distributed.
“The only thing that I’d like to ask for the consideration of this plan — because we have disparities and inequities in a lot of other places — whatever this ends up being, this is going to be a collective pot, not some individual school pot,” said board member Ricardy Anderson. “That’s what I would envision.”
Fairfax County explored the idea of selling naming rights back in 2009 but ultimately chose not to move forward.
Under the plan, Reid will develop a detailed proposal outlining how naming rights could be put into practice.
The board has requested that proposal by July, when members are expected to review it and potentially take a vote.
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