For $5,000, you can name a public restroom after yourself at the Nebraska State Fair. But naming the toilets after someone else as a joke won’t be allowed, said the fair’s executive director, Rick Bjorklund.

The Nebraska State Fair is selling naming rights for buildings and events at State Fair Park as a way to raise more money.

The plan was discussed Tuesday by the State Fair Board as it reviewed a two-year budget proposal.

According to the plan, for $100,000 people or businesses can have their names on Agriculture Hall or the Open Air Auditorium.

Street names will sell for between $1,000 and $2,500 a year.

And for $18,000, you can have your name on the hog barn.

“We have a modest revenue projection in each year of the budget we put forward,” Bjorklund said Wednesday of the naming rights. The fair is shooting for $40,000-$45,000 in both years, for a two-year revenue projection of $85,000.

“I think it’s an achievable goal,” Bjorklund said, who added that the program is already running at fairs in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana and other states.

The naming rights program is not an entirely new concept at the Lincoln fairgrounds.

Lincoln Benefit Life and Great Plains Communications have co-sponsored free concerts. And several organizations constructed buildings and playgrounds at the State Fair Park that carry their names.

Christine Rasmussen, marketing director for State Fair Park, will be running the new program. She had three conversations already Wednesday morning with potential name place buyers, Bjorklund said.

Ideas like selling naming rights will help keep the fair above water financially, he said.

The revenue forecast for State Fair Park would cover about $17.1 million of the two-year cost of about $20.6 million. The difference would be more than made up by the fair’s voter-approved annual $2 million portion of state lottery funds.

The lottery funds have taken the fair “off life support,” said Bjorklund. Now it’s time to try new ideas, he said.