PROTECT YOUR WALLET: “$AVE YOUR CITY”
Cities nationwide are hurting. One of the many side effects of their COVID pandemic-defensive “shelter in place” lockdowns has been a dramatic decline in municipal revenues. With bars, restaurants, salons, and other “non-essential” retail businesses closed down for the duration, local governments are experiencing sharp declines in their sales tax receipts.
What’s a city to do to make up for the shortfalls? After all, their expenses haven’t gone down in proportion to the revenue declines. So, administrators may often conclude that the red ink can only be made up for with increases in tax rates. But is that the only, or even the BEST answer to this problem?
One alternative would be to employ “municipal marketing” strategies. That means to offer a wide variety of businesses the opportunity to “rent” the use of city assets as a way to market their products or services. Cities that have aggressively pursued this method of raising funds have found that it can supply up to 2% of their general revenues. Whether these contractual relationships are called sponsorships or partnerships, they’ve proven to be a popular way to protect the tax paying public from unwelcome new burdens.
Twenty years ago, I helped my friend Don Schulte to create a company called “Public Enterprise Group,” or simply “PEG”. It was the first company in the nation solely dedicated to serving governments and institutions as their agents for the solicitation, negotiation, and consummation of municipal marketing contracts. Over the next several years, we found dozens of different “categories of opportunity” for these kinds of deals.
After we successfully sold PEG to a larger company, I decided to comfortably retire. But before going out to pasture, I wanted to share what we’d learned about municipal marketing by reporting our experiences in the form of a book. The first, self-published edition was listed on amazon as “$ave Your City” for a price of $49.95. The large-format paperback volume is a complete “recipe book” reference source. Step-by-step instructions are provided for every move that needs to be made for a program to succeed. It can be useful for everyone from government administrators to marketing professionals to ordinary taxpayers.
And now, a new edition of “$ave Your City”will be produced by Waldorf Publishing. Advance copies can be ordered for only $16.95. To order a copy of your own, or to give to your City Council representative, go to https://www.waldorfpublishing.com/product/save-your-city/313?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=3