Councilmember Diaz.

Absent Councilmember Heinz.

Councilmember Palmer?

Councilmember Rumba?

Here.

Councilmember Sidalgay?

Here.

Councilmember Scott?

Here.

Councilmember Walker.

Here.

Mayor Ibsen.

Here.

Our primary agenda item today is the Tacoma Sister Cities.

Like to call on public works principal business services analyst, congratulations, of course, Warren to begin the presentation.

So thank you, uh Mayor and Council for having this afternoon.

So I'm in front of you today in my capacity as the interim coordinator for the neighborhood council program.

Or I'm sorry, not the neighborhood council program, the Sister Cities Program.

And I'm joined by the Tacoma Sister Cities Council President Rhea Johnson.

So we're here today to okay, there we go.

Thank you.

Just to give you an update on the Sister Cities program.

So over the last uh couple years, we've had a number of updates to the program as it's transitioned.

So I'll go through the history a little bit and give you that update.

We're here in front of you today because the last time that the council got a presentation was uh in early 2025, right before the program transitioned into the mayor's office.

So it was the last time you received an annual report.

So today we want to be able to just give you an overview of the program and how it's changed and allow the sister cities council here to give just a little bit of an update on some of their activities and programmings that they're having going on right now and give you the opportunity to engage them more in depth as well.

A couple things I want to just preface before we jump into the rest of the presentation and the agenda for today is that this is not going to be a comprehensive annual report.

So there are a number of activities and events that Sister Cities Council manages over the course of the year.

We're not going to cover all of them here, uh, primarily for my portion of the presentation, especially.

We'll be focusing much more on the city's role in the Sister Cities program and the work that we've done since the transition to the mayor's office uh last year.

Um additionally, the those opportunities are open for you.

You'll hear from RIA towards the end of the presentation on opportunities to get involved with Sister Cities.

So please feel free after the uh presentation to grab uh RIA or some of the members of the Sister Cities Councils and Committees that are in the audience today to learn a little bit more about the events and programming that they have available or join some of their meetings in the future.

So jumping right in, just going to overview kind of the history of where the program has been and where it is now.

So the Sister Cities program started under President Eisenhower back in uh 1956.

So the Sister Cities program has been around for a number of years.

Uh the Tacoma Sister Cities International just celebrated their 70 years during their annual conference earlier this year.

And Tacoma has been involved in Sister Cities from the very beginning.

Uh Sylvia Sass had been part of the founder circle uh that Eisenhower had pulled together and helped to create our first Sister City in Kidakishi, Japan, just three years after the program had been uh created.

Shortly after, uh, the Sister Cities has been a uh committee under the CBC structure of the city for many, many years from the first initiation of the Japan Committee.

Um this continued much until the early 90s when the uh committee took on an independent nonprofit status and began to move to a slightly more independent model.

Uh between the early 90s and 2017, there was a shift over time of the program moving towards that nonprofit model in a way from direct city support and city management of it like our other CBCs.

And in 2017 through about uh 2022 or so, um the city had dedicated under uh mayor Strickland at the time uh 250,000 over five years, which COVID extended that five-year timeline a little bit as an intentional way to move the Sister Cities Council from being supported by the city and the city staff to being much more independent and setting themselves up for being able to go for other competitive funding sources and uh more long-term sustainability that didn't require strong city staffing.

And then as I mentioned, the most recent change to the program that we're kind of updating you on today is in uh February of 2025, after the last biennial budget, uh we shifted the program.

Uh for those of you that have been here for a while.

Sister Cities was managed under community economic development for many years.

Uh Debbie Bingham uh had managed the program for well over ten years and had done a really good job in that work, but the Sister Cities program uh takes up quite a bit of time for a lot of that coordination and uh the international relationships and kind of the unique nature of how many different organizations and partners you work with to make the cultural exchanges and hosting of delegations uh successful, required a lot more coordination than economic development was prepared to kind of take on at the time, and it didn't quite align with their strategic mission of what the city was trying to set out for uh economic development at the time.

So we worked with them to move the program into the mayor's office at the time.

So mayor's office, of course, we do a lot of that international work already.

We work with a lot of federal state partners and we work with a lot of community organizations already in the mayor's office that allow for those better partnerships and connections that can help to sustain the program and create opportunities for new events, new partnerships, and uh good experiences for when we're sending delegations out and abroad and when we're hosting them here in Tacoma as well.

So a handful of our international relationships, just to give you a sense.

So the sister cities program is broken into primarily sister cities and friendship cities.

And here in Tacoma, we also have a level of friendship called Provisional Friendship Cities.

Sister Cities, of course, is the highest level of formal relationship.

These go to the city council for adoption after they've gone through a significant process, both with the Sister Cities Council and through the administrative process of the city.

And is that highest level of kind of investment of our commitment to partnership and exchange with those communities?

Typically, the practice has been over the program that we only have one sister city in each country, and then we have a number of friendship cities that might support that as well.

Friendship cities are that lesser step, typically either because there's already a sister city in that country, or it's meant as kind of a temporary step to explore a relationship to see if a sister city friendship can materialize from that.

Most recently, at the end of last year, we approved uh the council approved the uh Kochi India relationship as a friendship agreement.