Clareview Rec Centre naming rights to be sold after split council vote

A northeast Edmonton rec complex will be getting a new name after Edmonton city councillors voted 8-5 Monday morning to sell naming rights to the facility for a fee that will be kept private.

The Clareview Community Recreation Centre will become the Jumpstart Community Recreation Centre on March 31, 2023. It will be named after the Canadian Tire charity for at least 10 years.

"We need to find creative ways of raising revenue and this is one of the ways that we incrementally find different ways. I know it's not a huge amount of money, but every dollar adds," Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said.

After the vote, he said "specifics" of the deal including a final price "will be negotiated with Jumpstart."

Councillors agreed to not publicly disclose the exact figure that will be paid, in alignment with privacy legislation.

The city's asking price was reached after researching similar naming agreements at 20 facilities across Canada, officials said, including Servus Credit Union Place in St. Albert and TransAlta Tri-Leisure in Spruce Grove.

The revenue from all of Edmonton's rec centres has fallen from $71 million a year pre-pandemic to an estimated $55 million a year now.

"If one were to be ideologically pure they wouldn't go this route, but this case makes sense as a bit of a pilot to see how it goes," Coun. Aaron Paquette said.

"It's not even so much the ideological purity here as much as the price. That we would be embarking on a path to sell five rec centres at $450,000, which is a rounding error in the grand scheme of our city budget. That's really concerning to me," Coun. Michael Janz said, referring to an earlier report that estimated how much the city could collect for naming rights.

Janz called the decision a "bridge too far" and a "slippery slope."

"I've not been pleased about this initiative to name public assets after private companies or private charities," he said during the meeting.

Janz voted against the motion, along with councillors Erin Rutherford, Jo-Anne Wright, Ashley Salvador and Anne Stevenson.

The city did an online survey and found that 62 per cent of respondents were "somewhat or very comfortable with the sale and temporary naming of select recreation facilities to offset the financial impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic."