The roughly $24,000 trip to China last month will prove to be money well spent, Mayor Shari Green predicted Monday during a post-trip synopsis with local media, but only if others step up and take advantage.
The city's role is limited to facilitating those opportunities, Green warned, and added it will ultimately be up to local entrepreneurs to deliver on those possibilities.
But she also indicated more steps will still need to be taken and stressed the importance of building strong mayor-to-mayor relationships to open the door for city businesses.
"Everything is approved by their government and if you don't have the blessing of the mayor, for lack of a better word, the business opportunities aren't going to happen for you," Green said. "They are very much a different country than us and decisions are made in a different way and the mayor of that city needs to feel confident that the mayor of this city is someone they want to do business with and that's the relationship building we wanted to do on this trip."
The crew of Green, acting city manager Kathleen Soltis, councillors Dave Wilbur and Lyn Hall and Initiatives Prince George head Heather Oland returned from the week-long trip with a memorandum of understanding with the mayor of Jiangmen to further strengthen "friendly cooperation" between the two cities.
It builds on relations established in 2010 when a delegation led by then-mayor Dan Rogers visited the city of 3.8 million people in the southern province of Guangdong and Jiangmen's mayor and council replied with a visit to Prince George.
The next step for the two, Green said, is to move ahead on a "concrete project."
"What can we do together to demonstrate what this mutually-beneficial relationship will look like," Green said. "And so, we work on some of the leads that we established while we were there around economic opportunities, education opportunities as well."
Most of the money for the trip came from the remainder of a $50,000 provincial grant bestowed to the city for the purpose of establishing a twinning relationship with a city in 2008, plus $10,000 that provincial Jobs Minister Pat Bell signed over after cancelling his own Chinese trade mission this fall. Some $3,358 remains in the fund while Oland's expenses were covered by IPG and the translation services are eligible to be covered under IPG's Western Economic Diversification grant funding agreement.
The highlight for Hall, a former school board chair, was a visit to reportedly one of the top-rated high schools in Guangdong as well as to Wu Yi University in Jiangmen, where international education opportunities were discussed
"The interest was unbelievable," Hall said. "They in fact were the ones in both locations to bring up the opportunity for professional exchange and professional development and that was certainly something that we were working on with the board in the last two years of my tenure."
Asked why a school district representative was not on the delegation, Green said they "consciously chose a government-to-government opportunity" and will be sharing what they've learned with local educators and institutions.
Wilbur said he gained a greater appreciation of the importance of building a relationship between mayors, thoughtGreen did a "terrific job" in that respect and maintained Prince George is on a faster track than many communities.
A trip to Prince George by Jiangmen officials is being planned for late spring.
