Mike Stampfler, city manager of Portage
The technical partnership between the city of Portage, Michigan, and the Municipality of Gabrovo began during Phase II of the Bulgaria Resource Cities Program in 1998. The two projects, Public/Private Partnerships and Citizen Participation, provided additional revenue for the municipality, new jobs for the community, additional investment opportunities for private business, and a centralized information center for citizens to obtain information and voice their opinions about the performance of the government and the needs of the community. These initiatives were continued in Phase III by replicating the successful model of Public/Private Partnerships in the municipalities of Sevlievo and Trjavna, and by developing a municipal Website as a means of expanding the opportunities for active citizen participation in Gabrovo.
During Phase III, the partners continued their successful work in three primary areas, reflecting Gabrovo’s needs and objectives: citizen participation, economic development, and public-private partnerships.
The city partners collaborated on the creation of a Municipal Website, which was successfully developed and launched with an interactive component allowing it to receive feedback from citizens on the wide scope of information and services provided by the Municipality. This resulted in improving the information provided and increasing citizen awareness and understanding of municipal services. As an additional component of the Gabrovo Website, an electronic Business Profile was developed by the partners and launched on the Internet with the specific purpose of responding to the needs of potential investors and promoting the business opportunities in the city. The information can be found at http://www.gabrovo.bg.
In the area of economic development, the counterparts have replicated their best practices, encouraging public-private partnerships (PPP) for economic development in the cities of Tryavna and Sevlievo. The outcomes of the replication of the Public-Private Partnership project in the communities of Triavna and Sevlievo show successful private investment, added revenue, and job creation for the replicant municipalities. The final output of PPP methodology applied to this property has been highly valued by the City of Triavna, given that the lot had been on the market for years. Gabrovo, in collaboration with Portage, published a handbook on project results, which was disseminated among Bulgarian municipalities.
The partnership teams have several long-term goals past the funded period, including the continued development of tools for Gabrovo to provide better information to citizens and to improve the transparency of the municipal government, further economic development in Sevlievo and Tryavna and the creation of jobs, attraction of potential investment to the region by both Bulgarian and international businesses, and dissemination of best practices and lessons learned among other municipalities.