For the Right Price, Your Name in Lights : Privatization: How much selling of city operations should be allowed in order to reduce chronic budget deficits?

Is the auctioning off of Los Angeles about to begin? Mayor Richard Riordan and the Library Commission have put a beguiling proposal on the table: Renaming any of the city’s 53 branch libraries in exchange for a $1-million donation to prevent cuts in hours and services. The proposal has drawn a mixed City Council response and raises a serious question for the body politic to consider: How far should the city should go to stave off its perennial budget crises?

The plan has some merit, in that 75% of the donations would go to the citywide library system, with the balance put in an interest-bearing account for the donor’s branch. But the scheme suggests a precedent for putting a cash price on maintaining police stations, parks, major streets, the harbor, the airport and even City Hall.

In an ultimate fantasy scenario, is it too much to wonder whether the rush to immortalize major donors may result in the Renaming of Los Angeles (RLA) for, say, a few billion dollars?

A RLA re-christening drive would, of course, create an identity crisis for the real RLA (once called Rebuild L.A.) The nonprofit, privately run relief effort was created by city officials in the wake of the 1992 riots. Might profits from a new RLA push become the successor in aiding inner-city businesses when the old RLA expires as planned in 1997?

Riordan is right to worry about ways to maintain services for city residents. So is Library Commission President Gary Ross in insisting that innovative funding techniques are necessary in the face of large budget constraints. He cites as a model the practice of naming hospitals and other facilities for their benefactors.

But the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre--even Griffith Park--stand apart philanthropically from the practice of naming city libraries after such famous Americans as Benjamin Franklin, John Muir and Amelia Earhart, or public facilities after former mayors Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley. Councilwoman Laura Chick aptly noted, in terms of the branch library auction, that naming a public building “used to be an honor based on the contribution of the person to humankind.”

The only good news is that the Central Library would be exempted from the plan. In 1993, the Council rejected a Riordan proposal to sell it to a subsidiary of the Philip Morris tobacco company and then lease it back for city use.

Like many natives, I find the idea of renaming public assets as homage to corporate giants because politicians can’t balance the books not only embarrassing but morally and culturally bankrupt. Where would it end? Ted Turner Harbor? Bill Gates International Airport? How about L.A. itself being renamed Sony City?