Coca-Cola’s Price Is Right for Huntington Beach
It was the least sentimental of the beach towns, which, paradoxically, always made me sentimental about Huntington Beach. I remember my first glimpse of it, when I’d first come to California--the rundown beach shacks, the rusty diners, the smell of crude oil and cocoa butter. A night when Los Lobos played at the Golden Bear and people danced so hard in the aisles that they called the fire marshals. The train tracks. A surfer boy’s kiss, once, on the pier.
It was never your first choice as the ritziest beach. It was always more mass than class. Still, it was a shock when it came to this: Last week, Huntington Beach--the self-proclaimed Surf City, U.S.A.--quietly became the first city in the nation to turn itself into a municipal version of the Staples Center. In short, it got an advertiser to sponsor the town.
By unanimous vote, the City Council agreed to make Coca-Cola the city’s official beverage. Here is what this means: For $300,000 a year, plus about the same amount in in-kind services and adopt-a-park programs, Coca-Cola will have dibs on every vending machine on city property. Coke will be front and center at city events. Each year, Coke will refurbish a city park, and will get to put its logo, discreetly, on things like basketball backboards and lifeguard towers and trash bins and those comfort stations where you rinse the beach sand from your kids’ backsides.
No, there will not be big Coke signs to ugly up the city, but there will be more sponsors (and logos). Possibilities include an official airline, credit card, film manufacturer and clothier. As of late last week, the idea was catching: City officials reported inquiries from San Francisco, Long Beach, Stockton and Cleveland. Sacramento is in negotiations with Pepsi for a “municipal sponsorship” worth between $500,000 and $900,000. The city of Garden Grove has signed up with the agent who did the Huntington Beach deal.
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It is long past the time for whimpering about the commercialization of modern life, for pining for the days when your kid’s school menu didn’t feature ads for M&Ms; and it wasn’t “the Rose Bowl presented by AT&T.;” Still, a whole city? What’s next? Taco Bell Gardens? Robinsons-Maywood? Citigroup of Industry?
It doesn’t help that Huntington Beach had reason to do what it did, that reason being Proposition 13. “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” sighed Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services. “But my choices were either this or more user fees.”
It was Prop. 13, you’ll recall, that shifted property tax money away from towns and cities and into the hands of Sacramento, Prop. 13 that forced cities to claw for the sales tax from card rooms and auto malls. When the recession hit and the state demanded more of the kitty, the cities were the losers. Between 1993 and 1999, Hagan says, Huntington Beach’s share of the pot dropped by $7 million a year.
Everything had to be cut; all were disgruntled. A consultant was hired to come up with new fees. Two out of three ideas were useless: Demand a quarter from every baby at the “tot-lot” playgrounds? Assess grandmas at the senior center? Charge admission for strolls on the pier?
Then, one Halloween night, a marketing guy who’d just moved to the city was sipping chardonnay with his neighbor while the wives trick-or-treated with the kids. The marketing guy was Don Schulte, an agent who’d gotten corporate sponsorships for the last World Cup, and the neighbor was John Erskine, the ex-mayor. Someone mentioned a municipal beachfront project, and two words: naming rights.
Well, naming rights didn’t fly without TV exposure, but there was interest if the city could “bundle its assets” and offer multiple “impressions”--if, in other words, it could put the words “Coca-Cola” under the noses of, say, 11 million beachgoers a year.
Thus was it done. And if it isn’t sentimental, it is progress and imagination, says the city. Which is to say, it is the new California, in the unsentimental way it has come now to imagine itself.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com
