Funding for a program intended to encourage international business as well cultural and artistic exchange is being cut due to the city's revenue shortfall.
The city allotment for the Tucson Sister Cities Association has fallen steadily over the past several years, from about $14,000 to $4,876 for fiscal 2010, and members of the association say they've been prepped for the funding to be eliminated next year.
The move makes little sense to Jerry M. Gary, treasurer of the association. He said the program encourages the flow of money into the city.
"Tucson's future is in developing international relations," he said. "We can't just live on the Mexican border."
Christina Parisi, assistant to City Manager Mike Letcher, said the budget cuts aren't personal - the city has reduced funding to all outside agencies (excluding for health and human services) by 60 percent.
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"We've reduced our budget over the past two years by over $100 million," she said. Even with those cuts, the city has a projected $33 million deficit for fiscal 2011.
"We're going through all of our funding, both internally and externally, and giving the mayor and council options on what to fund and how to fund it," she said.
Future funding for the Tucson Sister Cities Association is undetermined, Parisi said.
City Budget and Internal Audit Director Marie Nemerguth called next year's budget "a moving target." Funding for the association will be administered through the Tucson-Pima Arts Council, she said, because the association falls under the heading of arts and cultural enrichment.
The Arts Council's allotment, too, is still up in the air, but it will receive at least $442,330 to administer programs.
Tucson has a slew of active sister cities, including Almaty, Kazakhstan; Roscommon, Ireland; Pecs, Hungary; Segovia, Spain; and three in Mexico: Ciudad Obregon, Guadalajara and Mazatlan. Roscommon is the ancestral home of Hugo O'Conor, the Irish mercenary who established the military site that became Tucson.
Sister Cities International, the parent organization of the local association, seeks to promote "citizen diplomacy" through international connections in business, culture and art. In Tucson, the group and the sister city committees take part in the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival and work to bring officials, artists and cultural troupes from the sister cities here.
The Tucson Sister Cities Association was created in 1991 as an umbrella agency to administer city funds and national membership requirements for individual sister-city programs in Tucson - some of which have existed since the late 1970s.
This year alone, 22 students from Kazakhstan are studying at the University of Arizona. The executive director of international affairs at the UA, Kirk Simmons, said that number is largely due to the relationship established between Tucson and Almaty starting in the early 1990s.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, many local officials traveled from Almaty and other parts of Kazakhstan to study at the UA in part because a sister-city link already existed, Simmons said.
Foreign students inject tens of thousands of dollars into the local economy each year, he said.
"I know that the (Kazakhstan) embassy will be disappointed that the city is taking this action," he said.
Gary, the association's treasurer, and members of other sister-city committees said that although the budget cuts hurt, they're not necessarily a death knell for the program because each committee raises its own funds for projects. Much of the city funding goes for annual membership fees to Sister Cities International.
The city won't take into account how much revenue the sister-city committees generate when it sets funding, the city's Parisi said. The city doesn't pay the committees for economic development.
"We pay (the Tucson Sister Cities Association) to highlight art demonstrations during the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival," she said. "We pay them to promote membership in the Sister Cities program, and we pay them to promote visits to and from other sister cities."
Clayton R. Norman is a University of Arizona journalism student apprenticing at the Star. Contact him at 573-4244 or at starapprentice@azstarnet.com
