Selling our municipal soul: council monetizes The Oval and the Christmas Tree Lighting celebration

As I was writing the below commentary, a reader emailed the pictures above to me. These are the front and back of a flyer delivered to elementary school children in the Halifax area—and apparently to each and every child, directly, by their teachers, who, it appears, were ordered to distribute the flyers. The incident fits in nicely with the point I’m trying to make below, so I’ll return to it at the end of this commentary.

Tuesday, Halifax council met in secret for four hours and 15 minutes to discuss, then agree to, something related to naming rights for The Oval on the Halifax Common. What exactly that decision was, we have no idea; the name of the corporation and at least some of the other details of the deal will be made public at an unspecified later date.

Here’s what council didn’t do Tuesday, or any other time: hold a public discussion and vote about whether selling naming rights to part of the Common was an appropriate thing for the city to do in the first place.

I realize that many people think selling naming rights is a no-brainer; I disagree, and will get to that in a moment. For now, however, let me just say the question of whether selling naming rights is appropriate is a separate and distinct issue from how much those rights should be sold for, and to whom. While arguably (again, I disagree), the matter of negotiating the details of a sale of naming rights is subject to the rules of council secrecy, the broader philosophical discussion of selling naming rights in the first place is something that absolutely, without question, should have been held in public. That philosophical point is not a contractual matter. It is not a personnel matter. It is a public policy matter: should we sell our municipal soul, or not?

The broader community is split on the question. Many agree with me. Many others don’t. Councillors tell me council is split on the question. It’s a worthy discussion for public discussion and debate.

Probably people with my views would lose that debate. That’s the way democracy goes. But this wasn’t democracy: At no point did pro-naming rights councillors stand up before the public, make their case, and vote for all the world to see. Instead, they made that decision behind closed doors, without a recorded vote. There’s no way for the public to reward or punish councillors for their votes, because the public is completely in the dark on this.

What were councillors who support selling naming rights afraid of? Why couldn’t they stand up and announce their views in public?

The money issue

There’s something else council didn’t do Tuesday, and that’s tell us the dollar amount they sold out the Common for. For all we know, council sold naming rights to The Oval for eight bucks and 20 cents.

Maybe the dollar amount will be made public the same time as the corporate name for The Oval is announced, but I doubt it: We still don’t know, 14 months after the fact, how much BMO paid to put its corporate logo on the four-pad arena in Hammond Plains. We also don’t know, 30 months after the contract was awarded, how much the city is paying Nustadia to manage operations at the same four-pad arena—and we never will; my Freedom of Information request for the dollar amount was sloughed off into the parallel universe of FOI review, never to be seen from again. See, in the upside-down world of Halifax “democracy,” contracts between the city and corporations are top-secret, and no taxpayer has the right to see them. Ever.

Council justified its secret meeting Tuesday by noting that naming rights to The Oval are a “contractual matter,” just like the Nustadia contract and the BMO contract, so there’s no reason to expect we’ll be told how much The Oval naming contract is for.

Even if by some miracle the dollar amount is released at a future date, there is still no conceivable reason why it wasn’t released Tuesday. Council keeps stuff secret, because that’s what council does.

The valueless society

I think most people will agree with me that councillors should have voted in public about about the appropriateness of selling naming rights, and that the dollar amount the naming rights were sold for should have immediately been made public. I fear, however, that most people will disagree with me on the next point: that the city should not be selling naming rights to The Oval.

The default position for many people is something along these lines: “If it means the city’s costs for The Oval are lowered, I’m for it.”

While we all want fiscal prudence, the idea that anything that reduces costs to government is good is repugnant. We have competing values, and to unthinkingly privilege one value—saving the government money—over all other values is to discredit those other values completely; they simply don’t matter at all.

And in a broad sense, that’s what has happened to our society over the last few decades: we’ve subverted all other concerns by monetizing everything. There is literally nothing that doesn’t have a price tag on it. Nothing is sacred.

I’m sure it’s mostly considered quaint nowadays, but there used to be a notion that shared public space was special, something qualitatively different than commercial space. Public space was where people came together as equals, and because citizens had shared, collective ownership of the space, each person had rights and responsibilities—to be respectful, mindful and tolerant of each other, and to have pride in the shared community. Built and maintained by responsible governments, public spaces can bring out the best in people, and can actually build and strengthen communities.

Selling off the name to a public space, however, and especially selling off the name to a public space as popular and beloved as The Oval, is to turn that space into the checkout line at Sobeys. The owner-citizen becomes a customer; not just a customer making a purchase, but rather a customer with no opportunity to avoid the onslaught of screaming advertisements directed at her or him—that is, a mark, a sucker, someone to be exploited. It’s not just The Oval that is monetized, but also the citizen. This brings out the worst in people, and devalues community.

Invariably when I’ve raised objections, someone shoots back with “there’s advertising on buses!” I realize the advertising-on-buses horse left the barn long ago, but I’ll note that old pictures of Halifax’s electric buses don’t reveal advertising, and even present-day Greyhound and Acadian buses don’t seem to need them. But regardless, the argument seems to be this: There’s advertising on one public space, so therefore it’s OK that advertising be placed on any public space. Nothing is sacred.

Except the Common is sacred, or as close to sacred as a public space can be. It was set aside purposefully, forever to be used as a shared public space, distinctly for reasons of community building. In that respect, The Oval was a wonderful addition to the Common; people came together to play together, with shared joy in a collective space provided for exactly that purpose.

To say that there’s no difference between buses and the Common is most likely simple sophistry. But it’s possible people making the argument actually believe it, in which case my earlier point stands: the money-value trumps all other values: public space-value, community-value, shared purpose-value, etc. Money is more important than everything else, and so everything else has no value at all.

Monetizing Christmas

As if to illustrate the point, two days after council voted to monetize The Oval, Halifax-area elementary schools made sure that each and every child carried home the flyer pictured at the top of this post.

I’m not inclined to sentimentality, but (vague concerns about mixing religion and government aside) the annual Christmas tree lighting always struck me as an innocent, somewhat charming civic exercise. Kids and their parents come and watch the tree come on, ooh and aaah. City government is what bestows meaning in this drama: our collective representation, the expression of our collective self—government—manages, directs, and explains the ritual; it is our Christmas tree.

Or was, rather. Now it’s Shrek’s Christmas tree.

I’m told that in past years there was no corporate tie-in to the Christmas tree lighting, and why should there be? The city runs electric cord over to the tree, and the mayor throws the switch. It isn’t a multi-million dollar proposition.

But, anymore in our society, nothing at all has value unless it has commercial value, so we’ve monetized Christmas, we’ve turned our public school teachers into employees for Dreamworks, Inc. and we don’t bat an eye when a beer company sponsors the birth of Christ.

Back to Occupy

That everything in our society has been monetized pisses people off. It’s the heart of the Occupy protests, I think. As Matt Taibbi writes:

We’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket.

[…]

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2011.