Cooperation agreement
with Amsterdam near
~ Mayor Cohen to visit St. Maarten ~
PHILIPSBURG--The City of Amsterdam and the Island Territory of St. Maarten are getting ready to sign an agreement of cooperation in August this year. Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen will sign the agreement on his first visit to the island; he will also give a lecture on safety.
An advance party consisting of the Chief of the Mayor’s Cabinet and Director of International Relations Gerard Pieters was in St. Maarten recently to prepare for the Mayor’s visit and the signing of the agreement. St. Maarten and Amsterdam have already been cooperating in several areas and this document should be seen as a formalisation of that, explained Pieters.
This agreement is the first of its kind for St. Maarten. After the visit to St. Maarten, the party will sign a similar document in Curaçao with the government of that island. St. Maarten will also be the very first Antillean island visited by Mayor Cohen. He will be on the island with a delegation of seven August 26-29.
In the agreement, parties will agree to continue and support exchange and know-how in several fields. These include facility management and public service, corporate identity development, integrity policies, public health, public administration and archives.
St. Maarten’s Executive Council has already approved the agreement. On the request of the Executive Council, there will be a few additions to the document in the areas of e-government, support for the transition to become a country, safety and archaeology. Lt. Governor Franklyn Richards will sign the agreement on behalf of the Island Territory.
St. Maarten and Curaçao are the only two Antillean islands with which the City of Amsterdam is intensifying relations. The largest city in the Netherlands has been setting up similar cooperation agreements with Suriname, Turkey, Morocco and Ghana. It has cooperation agreements with three East European cities and with Beijing in China.
Pieters and Director Maria Cuartas y de Marchena of the Mayor’s Cabinet said the preparatory meetings on St. Maarten had gone very well. They said it was clear that the authorities and departments they had spoken to were very willing to give content to the cooperation with Amsterdam.
Cohen is a well-known and a favourite mayor not only in the Netherlands, but also internationally. He was recognised as European Hero by Time magazine in 2005 and placed second in the World Mayor Competition in 2006, after the Mayor of Melbourne, Australia. His Dutch colleague mayors proclaimed him Best Mayor of the past 25 years in 2006. Cohen recently received an honorary degree from University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Cohen will lecture on safety, highlighting the importance of involving all stakeholders, especially the community, in making people’s surroundings safer. He will be giving the lecture on the request of Lt. Governor Richards.
More on the pending agreement and Cohen’s visit in The Daily Herald’s WEEKender supplement this Saturday.
