Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish is expected to announce <s>Tuesday</s> Wednesday at the State of the County speech a new deal with KeyBank as the naming rights partner for the Cleveland Convention Center.
Specific contract numbers were not immediately known, but sources put the deal at more than $350,000 a year for 20 years, which would be above the national average of about $322,000 a year for such contracts in similar markets.
The Superlative Group, a Westlake-based company with a national portfolio of work in this area, had been contracted by the county and city to find naming rights partners for the Convention Center and Med Mart, as well as other sponsorship deals. The $500,000 yearly fee for its services was split between the county and city since 2013. The more than $7,000,000 in profits will be split as such too.
A county spokesman, a representative from KeyBank and the Superlative Group did not respond with comment before press time.
We’ll filter in details on signage placement and timeframes, as well as comment from the relevant parties, as we get them.
This post originally misstated the date of the State of the County speech as April 14. It is in fact on April 15.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2015.
Can those numbers possibly be correct? The deal is worth $350,000 for 20 years, so that’s where the $7M comes from. But they have to split that with Superlative Group, so now we’re down to $3.5M. How many years has Superlative been working on this? Gotta be at least 2, if not more, right? So now we’re down another mil. Over 20 years, that’s a paltry $125,000 per year. I guess that’s better than $0/year, but if the national average is $322,000, it would seem they could have gotten a better deal just putting a “Wanted: Sponsorship” classified in the PD instead of hiring Superlative. Ok, bad example. No one reads the PD. But you get my point…..