Update at 3:19 p.m.: City spokesman Doug Adolph provides the disappointing news that the city has turned down SugarDaddie.com's $4.6 million offer.
"We decided to agree to disagree," he says. "Sugar Land is not for sale."
Mayor Thompson did, however, provide a counter offer: If the dating site would relocate from California to Sugar Land, the city would give the equivalent of half of what the company saved in taxes to charity. The site rejected the offer.
Original post:Last month, SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as the "elite sugar daddy dating site for those seeking Mutually Beneficial Relationships® & Mutually Beneficial Arrangements™," blitzed Texas media with a press release identifying the state as a hotbed for co-eds turning to the "Sugar Baby Lifestyle" to pay their college tuition.
Not to be outdone, SugarDaddie.com, the "first and original Sugar Daddie site," has raised the bar for outrageous publicity stunts by a shady dating website. Last week, the company offered the city of Sugar Land, a Houston suburb, $500,000 to change its name to SugarDaddie, USA.
The proposed change would be all-encompassing: parks, the fire department, City Hall, the airport, the minor league ballpark, down to official city letterhead would all bear the SugarDaddie name for a decade.
"We are hell-bent on creating the first dating site-sponsored city in America," SugarDaddie.com CEO Steven Pasternack said in a press release, noting that the company considered approaching Sugar Creek, Missouri, Sugar City, Idaho, Sugar City, Colorado, and any number of similarly named cities before settling on Sugar Land.
Sugar Lane Mayor James Thompson rejected the offer in an interview with a local radio station. "I'd consider any offer, but I get to do the zeroes and the decimal points, know what I mean?"
SugarDaddie.com knows exactly what he means. It will make a "final in-person offer of $4.65 million" for the name change, according to a press release. This after Pasternack realized that -- wait for it -- "everything's bigger in Texas."
Pasternack will deliver the offer to Thompson in person today at 11 a.m. What will happen then is anyone's guess. If the city refuses, the website is open to any Dallas suburbs that might be interested, according to the press release that somehow got caught in my spam folder.
