Name a beacon, bail out a city

Oh, well -- what's one more "for sale" sign on a piece of property in Southern California? It's better than a foreclosure sign.

But what if the sign is in front of Los Angeles City Hall?

That tireless optimist, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is prepping us for something big and nasty when he warns that he doesn't want to "sugarcoat" the city's money problems and that "crisis" is not too strong a word when we might be staring at a half-billion-dollar municipal pothole called the budget deficit.

How's he planning to fill that hole? Here's one of his ideas: naming rights. This has been on his mind since at least 2006, when he said it "just boggles the mind" that the MTA had banned most advertising. Now, our buses are rolling billboards; if you get knocked flat by a bus, you just have to look up for the phone number of a personal injury lawyer.

No doubt Villaraigosa is thinking bigger now. Get ready for "your name here," there and everywhere.

It's not an original idea. Sports stadiums no longer bear heroes' names but sponsors'. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (named in honor of war veterans) hopes for at least $5 million a year for naming rights, and I hope that a certain condom manufacturer writes the check just so I can hear sportscasters welcome everyone to the USC Trojans' Trojan Coliseum.

All that dough puts a covetous gleam in civic eyes. L.A. County welcomed sponsor ads on benches and trash bins at the beaches 10 years ago. New York City, if you believe the New York Post, may offer up naming rights to its parks. Some opportunities go cheap: Naming rights to Baltimore's "Martin Luther King Jr. Parade Presented by Forman Mills" went for a staggering $7,500. At least King still gets top billing -- for now.

But Los Angeles won't come cheap, baby. What would L.A. put on the naming-rights auction block? Probably anything -- if the price is right. It already tried putting libraries on the block, although not without resistance. A dozen years ago, locals demanded that the new Watts library branch be named for a woman who acted like a citizen, not a CEO; she bought thrift-store books for kids and campaigned door to door for the library bond measure. They won.