Two cities no longer its sisters, NLR says

Inactivity between North Little Rock and its sister cities in Mexico and Turkey has led Mayor Joe Smith to sever ties with them, even if the action is technically unofficial, he said.

Smith first mentioned publicly Monday, during a 2016 budget preview to the City Council, that the city no longer considers Uruapan in Mexico’s Michoacan state, and Samsun, Turkey, as being among its sister cities.

Uiwang City, South Korea, is North Little Rock’s third sister city, and it maintains an annual student-exchange program.

“We haven’t had any activity with Mexico or Turkey in a number of years,” Smith said. “I couldn’t even tell you what their names were.

“I felt like if we’re going to have a sister city, it needed to be an active partnership,” Smith added. “It just quietly dissolved. If there’s anything we officially need to do, we’ll certainly do it.”

While the addition of a sister city usually comes with some fanfare, the elimination of the two cities didn’t get any specific mention before last week.

North Little Rock held a formal signing ceremony at City Hall in 2005 to add Uruapan, and Mayor Patrick Hays and City Alderman Maurice Taylor went to Uruapan in 2011 at a cost

to the city of $2,239, according to city Finance Department records.

A six-member delegation that included three aldermen traveled to Turkey in 2006 to sign the sister-city agreement in Samsun, costing city taxpayers $12,773.

North Little Rock’s website, nlr.ar.gov, hasn’t listed the two under its “Sister Cities” heading since the beginning of the year, when a redesigned website went live, city Communications Director Nathan Hamilton said.

Despite their absence from the website, Smith’s revelation Monday caught aldermen by surprise, several said.

Smith brought up the severing of ties when he proposed doubling the sister cities program budget to $30,000. The increase is partly to fund adding the township of Coreglia Antelminelli in the Italian province of Lucca as a sister city.

The program’s budget had been reduced from $25,301 in 2013 to $15,000 in 2014 and 2015.

“Not until he said it the other night,” Alderman Murry Witcher, the council’s senior member, said when asked if he knew about eliminating the two sister cities. “I knew Mexico was iffy because of the situation down there. Turkey kind of surprised me.”

Uruapan is in an area of Mexico where violent drug cartels have operated.

Alderman Charlie Hight said he had “thought they trashed the sister city in Mexico because of it being in a bad area of Mexico.”

“That was pretty much all new to me, except that we might be adding a sister city from Italy, or I knew there had been some discussion of [Italy],” Hight said of the elimination of Uruapan and Samsun. “I didn’t know they had dropped the one in Turkey.”

Alderman Debi Ross also said she “did not know they were officially no longer our sister city.”

Alderman Steve Baxter said he knew “we haven’t been doing anything for years” involving those two cities, but he wasn’t aware of “anything ‘formal’ being done.”

Margaret Powell, the city’s director for external affairs who coordinates the South Korean student exchange program, said Friday that it’s common for sister city agreements to “have an expiration.” South Korea’s agreement is North Little Rock’s oldest, starting in July 1999.

Turkey’s sister city agreement began in 2003 with North Little Rock taking possession of the Razorback submarine, which had been in the Turkish navy as the Murat Reis since that country obtained the boat in 1970 from the U.S. Navy. The Mexico agreement began in 2005.

“Mexico, for example, we just didn’t have any activity with them,” Powell said. “They were supposed to send a delegation back here [in 2012 or 2013], and it didn’t materialize. With the [crime] problems in Mexico, we’ve not initiated anything with them since. It’s not a situation where we would send kids over there, for example.

“The Turkish city’s has sort of lagged a bit since it started,” she said. “Travel and business in Turkey is still a real possibility. There just hasn’t been any real activity with them. Honestly, I don’t know why.”

The proposed budget increase shows that Smith hasn’t soured on the sister cities program. He spoke positively last week about the proposed addition of Coreglia Antelminelli, saying it would provide benefits to arts and culinary education through tourism exchanges.

Mayor Valerio Amadei of Coreglia Antelminelli plans to visit North Little Rock and said in a letter to Smith that his city is “full of pride that we will be [a] Sister City with a prestigious city.”

“We could do exchanges with artists and chefs and possibly tap into some sort of business exchange,” Smith said. “We could have economic benefits with this partnership. We enjoy having friends in other countries.”