Closer Relations with Europe

Prior to the official start of our meetings Monday, several representatives from ICMA met Sunday afternoon with representatives of the European Federation of Local Government Chief Executives which goes by the acronym of its name in French UDiTE (pronounced "U-de-Tay").

The current President of UDiTE, Byron Davies (Chief Executive of Cardiff City Council in Wales) is keen on a closer partnership between UDiTE and ICMA. We spoke for over an hour on what might be done. First and foremost is the idea of knowledge exchange. How can "best practices" be exchanged between managers in Europe and around the world through ICMA. Language was a key issue discussed. UDiTE has a challenge to get information out in all the languages used today in Europe. No longer can English and French be enough. ICMA has a great wealth of information to be shared on many, many topics but it is almost all in English only. We agreed to work on initiatives to identify publications of ICMA that could be published and distributed in languages other than English.

We also discussed how to better involve the national local government management associations that are members of UDiTE and affiliates of ICMA (some are with both organizations, others just one of the organizations) in training and knowledge base exchange. UDiTE is also eager to expand its role outside of Europe and is looking for support for their bid to host the 2011 Commonweath Local Government Forum's conference in Cardiff.

UDiTE has become a revitalized group over the last few years and ICMA is eager to work with UDiTE to strengthen our partnership to support European local government managers. At the end of the meeting, we agreed on developing a workplan of specific items to address over the next twelve months with a check-in meeting again at the ICMA Annual Conference in Montreal in September.