Good evening.

I'd like to call to order our city council study session for Tuesday, September 10th, 2024.

I'm going to ask Council Member Tadeo to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Before we get into the meat of our agenda, one one thing to note the last item on our agenda will not happen.

The department update will be postponed to another study session in the future.

So just so you know that.

First, let's talk about uh consider appointment to the parks and recreation advisory board.

City manager Martinez.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and Council.

Our city clerk will introduce this item.

Thank you, City Manager Martinez.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

The Parks and Recreation Advisory Board is recommending the appointment of Megan Mothershead as an alternate member of their board.

If you noticed in your packet there was a summary.

So I hope that helped to answer some questions.

Anyone have any questions about her?

I don't see any problem with that.

Okay, on the next agenda.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Next week in the main part of the agenda is the sister cities update.

City Manager Martinez, please introduce our presenter.

Thank you, Mayor.

At this time, I will ask our presenters for the sister cities update to come up.

It's been a while since we've had an update on the sister cities program, so I'm looking forward to hearing the conversation.

And with that, I will turn it over to Ken Kreitzer and Gang.

Welcome, folks.

Good evening, Mayor, Council.

And it's an honor to be here tonight to give you kind of a story of Brighton sister cities.

What we'll do is I'll give you a little bit of the past.

I hope we have too much divide, so this is a good way to get things started.

Over since 1956, there are over 300 member communities worldwide with 2,000 partnerships, many of them having more than one, and 140 countries that are involved in the sister cities movement worldwide.

A gentleman from Brighton who was grew up in Poland, Henry Ross, his Polish name is Henry Rosuszewski.

Henry was back in his hometown of Wurzlaw, Poland, and he was talking to some people and enjoying a cold one on the plazas they do in Poland.

And he was approached by some individuals, some government officials from the town of Zembica, about 45 minutes away from Wurzlaw, and asked if he was from the U.S.

And then said, would you know of a community that might be interested in becoming a sister cities with us because they were they were looking to form a relationship in the United States.

And so I think many of you know Henry, and if you don't know Henry, Henry doesn't take no for an answer, and he's kind of a get it done guy, and as a matter of fact, he's in Poland right now.

But uh Henry came back and he did a lot of selling, and it took him it took him some time to uh build up the what the the I don't know the storm it would take to create a sister cities with Gymbica, and he thought Brighton would be the perfect city that that would be the perfect sister city to Zembica at the time.

Brighton and Gymbica were pretty close in size.

Um just we were about 15,000, they're about 10,000, and just a lot of things lined up, and there was really four main focuses at the time that they were gonna focus on education, uh medicine, agriculture, and government.

And so kind of a start of a committee, and I'm gonna leave some people out, but the first couple exchanges and so forth, getting things going.

Neil Fleshhauer represented education, Janine Slavinski and Darrell Myers were kind of the force behind the agriculture.

Susan Petraco, who's with us tonight, um, was kind of the force behind agriculture.

Bob Grant kind of was there for some government.

And the discussion was started, and uh I know I've had talks with uh former Mayor Hamstra and uh even uh former Mayor Lucero that Henry just wasn't gonna go away.

And so he sold it, and and I remember being a Kwanian in Brighton and them coming before Brighton Kwanis and talking about it, and I'm thinking, what would we want to do in Poland?

And but lack of foresight on my part at the time turned into a life-changing experience for me.

And so on August 15th, 1995, um resolution 95-27 was signed by Mayor Hantresser and uh supported by the city council that time, starting the sister city movement with Brighton and Zembica.

And ironically, 29 years ago, yesterday, um, on September 9th, 1995, Mayor Novak in Gembicia finalized the agreement, and our sister cities organization has begun.

And when you after that, you say, and like they say, the rest is history, it has changed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides.

Um since then, our uh our our focus is really changed to we really focus on the youth exchange and the cultural exchange of getting the youth from Brighton and the youth from Gembica to go and understand each other's uh cultural uh where they live, what it's like, and so forth.

Um the the youth exchange has become our focus over time.

Um we do that through a youth exchange where on even years we go to Zembica and on odd years they come here, and uh as the case this this year we went there.

We also kind of changed our, not really changed, we added to our focus this past couple years, and our sister cities organization, and I'll I'll give credit to the Simcoxes for really taking the ball and uh helping them because when the war broke out in the Ukraine, a lot of the refugees uh went to Zembica and all the other communities around uh Poland to find a safe place to live and a place that they could possibly find some employment and uh housing and so forth.

And I'll I'll give credit to the Simcoxes for really taking the ball and uh helping them because when the war broke out in the Ukraine, a lot of the refugees uh went to Zembica and all the other communities around uh Poland to find a safe place to live and a place that they could possibly find some employment and uh housing and so forth.

And our sister cities organization helped provide how many dollars.

30,000 somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 of aid that went there, and it helped purchase things that they needed um to help house them washing machines, appliances, food supplies, and so forth.

And they've even created a pantry that gets filled on a continual basis today that any of the the uh refugees that still are there can go and pick up food and effort.

So those efforts continue today.