More naming rights available at Lansdowne Park, OSEG says
Retail plans, football program all firming up
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 8, 2014
OTTAWA — Having sold the name of Frank Clair Stadium and the Civic Centre to the TD banking empire, the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group is out to find more parts of Lansdowne Park for businesses to sponsor.
“Theoretically, everything else is available. It’s just a question of what somebody wants,” said Roger Greenberg, the chairman of OSEG, the consortium of builders and sports businessmen who are the city government’s partners in the half-billion-dollar redevelopment of the stadium and the Glebe fairground in which it sits.
An early estimate that the naming rights would fetch about $15 million shot up to $50 million by the time OSEG and the city finalized their deal in late 2012. The estimate of what the revenues would be worth over 30 years included the rights to name not just to the stadium and hockey rink, but to adjoining retail area, too.
That works out to about $1.2 million a year. Greenberg wouldn’t say exactly what TD is paying for the naming rights to the stadium and the hockey rink beneath it, but it’s more than $1 million a year in a long-term deal, so the target is almost met. The money goes into the pool of revenues that are to be divided between OSEG and the city.
The next task is to make deals with about four “founding partners,” more big-name sponsors who will probably get their logos on the stadium and may want to label other things at Lansdowne with their names. Greenberg hopes to nail down four by June, as OSEG’s Canadian Football League team takes the field.
“There’ll be areas that we can provide other assets, other squares, end zones, there’s a list of a whole bunch of things that we can and will be making available for our founding partners,” Greenberg said. “We wanted to get through naming rights first, and then what are the assets that (TD) are going to be claiming, and then when we talk about the founding partners, we talk about assets they’re interested in.”
You can stick a corporate name on just about anything someone is willing to pay for, though “there’s always a big drop-off from naming rights to everything else,” Greenberg said. People will call the stadium complex “TD Place” in regular conversation; they probably won’t talk about a wide receiver making it into the “Molson end zone” for a touchdown.
If somebody wants the naming rights to the shopping centre next to the stadium, they’ll be available, Greenberg said. Not on the table are the names of the Lansdowne buildings and places that remain fully under the control of the city: the Aberdeen Pavilion, the Horticulture Building, the urban park and its components, the square that’s to hold a farmers’ market. The whole place will still be called Lansdowne Park, a detail that’s been settled after the city and OSEG signed the redevelopment agreement. The city could rename those things if it wanted to, but city manager Kent Kirkpatrick is on record saying it won’t.
Greenberg said the TD naming is the first of a series of Lansdowne-related announcements OSEG is planning this winter, of varying magnitude. One big one is a major update on the tenants signed to leases in the retail buildings along the north and west edges of the property, extending the list beyond the marquee names of Sporting Life and Whole Foods and a handful of restaurants and banks and an LCBO.
That should include a final confirmation of the cinema chain that’ll take over the building that was being built for Empire Theatres before its corporate owner bailed out of the movie business last summer. Greenberg didn’t repeat it Tuesday, but OSEG has previously said that it’s negotiating with Cineplex and got as far as (mistakenly) putting up hoardings with Cineplex’s logo along Bank Street.
That deal seems all the more important now that efforts to keep the World Exchange cinema open appear to have finally failed, leaving no big first-run multiplex even close to Ottawa’s downtown core.
The start of football season looms ever closer, though, with the first kickoff around Canada Day this year to be Lansdowne’s first big show even as work on parts of the site continues for a year or so after that.
“There’s an incredible amount of activity taking place behind the scenes so that when a team shows up in July, they’ve got uniforms, they’ve got pads, they can call a play,” Greenberg said.
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