Mayor Colonel Sanders at your service (photo from Advertising Age via The 13th Floor)

Tina Trenkner at The 13th Floor (a great blog for policy wonks and followers of “best” practices nationwide) found this humorous - or horrifying depending on your perspective - plan by several cities to deal with some minor infrastructure repair.

Fast-food chain KFC is offering to fix four cities’ pothole problems in a public-private partnership designed to help advertise the freshness of the restaurant’s food, reports Advertising Age.

KFC will essentially pay for the patch an then put a temporary chalk logo over the repaired asphalt.  Public-private partnerships like this are not new by any stretch and fit into the category of new bus shelters supported by advertising revenue or other such sponsorship.  What’s unclear from the article is whether KFC is just transferring some money to the Louisville, KY general fund in exchange for chalking over potholes that are scheduled to be fixed or they are directly paying paving contractors to do the work.  That second model would clearly be a bit more controversial given the concerns of unionized city workers and concerns about accountability over the quality of the patch job.

Anyway… assuming it is just a “sponsorship” model, what other companies do you think could fit well with other low level city services?