New Year’s Resolution: bury FTX arena branding fiasco

What’s the most visible embarrassment that government here both caused and can still easily erase?

As we start a new year, we seek low-hanging fruit to make big personal improvements fast. That’s the premise of a New Year’s Resolution, that we can wipe out mistakes or omissions and take major strides.

But there has been no parallel public New Year’s Resolution to make a quick, impactful community fix. We’d like to suggest an easy one.

Using the criteria of rapid action to right a major wrong, we can’t quickly fix a water and sewer problem caused by decades of neglect, or provide thousands of housing units at low rent, or beef up inadequate public education, or fix transportation that is far behind need, or combat environmental change that we long ignored, or erase other blots in which governments have been complicit.

But one folly created by government can and should be erased immediately. For Heaven’s sake, get the name FTX off what used to be American Airlines arena.

FTX, remember, purchased the naming rights from a county that should have known better than to make a 10-year deal for $135 million with a three-year-old company doing something that nobody really understood. We should have said no regardless of how much money the CEO flashed around.

Nobody listened to county Chief Operations Officer Jimmy Morales, who warned, “We of course recognize that there is risk in this deal, particularly with a relatively new company in a relatively new industry.”

Risk is an understatement. Call it greed, embarrassment and shame.

Look where it stands now: everyone going past the public’s arena in the heart of downtown sees an emblazoned FTX, every sports announcer covering a Miami Heat game blares out the name to the world, every event in the arena comes under the FTX rubric.

Meanwhile, the company is bankrupt and founder Sam Bankman-Fried, age 30, has been charged with defrauding customers of his crypto-currency exchange. He’s also charged with conspiracy, fraud, money laundering and violating campaign finance laws.

He’s a poster boy for everything with which Miami does not want to be branded. But Miami is branded that way so long as the arena trumpets FTX to the world.

We bought a deal that was too good to be true, and it was too good to be true. FTX lost $16 billion in value in seven days, and rather than get $135 million over 10 years, the county isn’t going to get a penny more than the $20 million it’s gotten already – maybe far less, if the legal system claws the $20 million back for FTX clients who lost their investments.

Yet the county said after FTX collapsed that it didn’t intend to take the name down until it found another sponsor. Since it took years to hook FTX – or, rather, for FTX to hook the county – that would guarantee that FTX would continue to represent our arena as a public badge of county shame.

The quick fix is simply to rename the arena and take the shameful name off. Pick a new name and hang it out front. Don’t wait for a contract of many millions of dollars, just do it free.

Remember, however, that whatever we stick out front becomes a brand. Don’t use the name of a past mayor or commissioner who is still around. Too many streets here were named for living persons who were later disgraced.

For a fitting name, look to our history, recent or long past, but not a commercial interest. Look toward what has made this community tick.

Just look fast. The fix can, and should, be quick. The shame mounts daily.