Selling advertising space on car park walls and licensing ice cream vendors in parks are just two of the money spinning ideas being considered by Exeter City Council.
A special task and finish group was asked to find ways of generating money for the cash-strapped council which says it is facing ever decreasing budgets; the city council has to save £4m over the next three years.
Council staff were asked to come up with ideas.
The following ideas have now been put forward by the task and finish group for further consideration.
The city's resources scrutiny committee is being asked to approve business cases being prepared for several ideas when it meets next week.
The ideas are:
establishing a solar photovoltaic site on city council owned land;
registering St Nicholas Priory for weddings which would mean couples tying the knot in what was once the guest wing of a Benedictine priory and which is now presented as the home of an Elizabethan family. Another idea is to maximise the use of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) for corporate events.
selling external advertising on the outside of car parks in a prominent place.
maximising the use that is made of Exeter's many parks and open spaces. There are suggestions that they could be used for concerts, weddings, open air cinema, increasing the number of facilities people pay for, and licensing ice cream vendors for parks.
Other ideas include appointing a dedicated member of staff to bid for external funding and introducing voluntary donations for entry into the RAMM.
Pete Edwards, leader of the city council, said: "With cuts in government grants we are having to be more inventive in finding ways of raising money, we have to come up with other revenue streams.
"We have had other ideas and threw some of them out but these are being brought forward for further discussion although it has yet to be decided if any of them will be taken up.
"We are already doing things to raise money, for example putting solar panels on the top of the John Lewis and Mary Arches car parks."
