Eden Prairie Public Works Director Gene Dietz and I had the opportunity to host a group of nine municipal Public Works Directors (and one municipal CEO) from Australia yesterday. Here we are in the group shot photo in our Council Chambers.
The Australians were in the United States to attend the annual International Public Works Association conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Prior to coming to Minneapolis, the group had toured public works facilities in Hong Kong, Calgary, Edmonton, and Minneapolis. They were interested in visiting Eden Prairie because they wanted to see how a small community handles public works issues.
We toured our Street Maintenance Facility. Showed them a snow plow, a fire truck, and police squad car in the process of having its radios installed. We showed them our dump trucks, our traffic signal maintenance equipment, and our wood shop. They asked lots of questions and took lots of photos.
You might be interested in how they found us. It turns out that the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia Limited (IPWEA), a fellow named Chris Champion, has been a loyal reader of my blog for quite some time. When he figured out that Eden Prairie is suburb of Minneapolis, and that he was going to be taking a group of his Public Works Directors to the conference in Minneapolis, he e-mailed me to see if he could bring them into Eden Prairie. I said “yes”, of course. And the rest is history.
That’s Chris in the middle of this photo. He and the President of the IPWEA are shown accepting a Key to the City of Eden Prairie:
The members of the group are probably at Heathrow Airport in London right now getting ready for a very, very long plane ride back to Australia. It’s almost 24 hours in the air from London to Sidney. They told me that they’d be looking for their smiling faces in the blog.
So, G’day mates to my new friends from Boroondara, Victoria; Stonnington, Victoria; Hobart, Tasmania; Bayside, Victoria; and to my colleague Mr. John Bonker, Chief Executive Officer (aka City Manager) for the Town of Victoria Park, Western Australia.
Thanks for visiting us and travel safely.
