Coming soon, perhaps, the MTA Visa card. But rest assured you won’t be crossing the Donald Trump Triborough Bridge in the near future.

The board of the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted yesterday to hire a marketing firm to help license the agency’s name and products to businesses, board members said.

The board justified the step toward commercializing its assets – which it said it will do tastefully – as something that could help generate tens of millions of dollars for the agency, which faces a deficit of $586 million in 2006 and $1.5 billion in 2007.

The proposal to hire the Civic Entertainment Group and Octagon Worldwide Inc., a joint partnership, passed easily, but not before one board member, Barry Feinstein, a former union official, reproached fellow directors for selecting a marketer before debating the issue. That sent the board into a rare deliberative mode.

Mr. Feinstein, who eventually abstained from the otherwise unanimous vote, scolded the board for moving ahead with a plan he said amounted to a change in the long-standing policy of not selling the naming rights of stations and other MTA assets. He criticized the board for initiating a procurement process before meeting to deliberate the change.

“This is something that goes to the heart of what this board does or does not do,” Mr. Feinstein said. “If this board determines after its own debate that it should go into this market, then it will go into this market.”

A budget crisis has forced the MTA to follow other cities that have licensed transit assets to businesses, such as San Diego, Dallas, and Las Vegas.

The joint venture approved yesterday would earn money only from commissions, which range between 15% and 25% based on the amount of revenue brought in. The board did not say how much revenue it expects the new venture to garner. The MTA generated $77 million from ad revenue in 2003, up from $37 million in 1997.

The chairman of the board, Peter Kalikow, commended the MTA advertising staff for “thinking outside the box” for new revenue streams, and he tried to assuage the concerns of Mr. Feinstein.

“We can move this contract today without moving any of the projects,” he said.

That prompted Mr. Feinstein to wonder whether selling naming rights would eventually lead to renaming subways after corporate sponsors.

“So what you are telling me,” he said, “is that we won’t find out at the next meeting that the 59th Street is the Toyota station?”

That, the head of the MTA’s real estate and advertising department, Roco Krsulic, assured him, would not happen.

In another effort to increase revenue, the MTA is raising subway fares February 27 on unlimited MetroCards and hiking commuter rail fares by an average of 5%.Tolls on bridges and tunnels increase March 1 by 50 cents.