Yesterday, Wednesday July 2, Fort Frances Mayor Andrew Hallikas and Mayor Drake Dill of International Falls came together to sign a declaration of friendship between the two municipalities.
Following the ceremony Halikas noted that in conversation both mayors acknowledged that citizens of both towns were wary about crossing the border, prompting the idea for the declaration.
“It’s incredibly important that we are friends and that we stay friends, but unfortunately there’s been some rhetoric coming out of the federal governments,” Hallikas said.
“That rhetoric sometimes can poison the air. I had questions raised to me by residents of Fort Frances, ‘are we welcome in the Falls?’ and when I went over to see Mayor Dill he said the same thing, ‘some of our residents are wondering, they’d like to go across, are they going to be welcome? What’s going to happen?’”
The uncertainty between neighbours was what led Hallikas and Dill to devise the plan for the proclamation.
“We thought, well, that’s not good. We need to do something about that,” Hallikas said.
“We need to show some local leadership. So we thought, what can we do to bring people together? Sure, we’ve been sister cities, but let’s reaffirm that relationship. Let’s write a proclamation of friendship and sign that publicly, and then let’s invite everyone for a cook out. So that’s exactly what we did, and we got a tremendously positive response for that.”
A number of people turned up from both sides of the border to see Hallikas and Dill read the proclamation and sign it before raising the Minnesota state flag over the City of International Falls flag which has regularly flown at the Fort Frances Civic Centre.
Dill says he thinks that municipal governments often can do things better at a local level.
“I think things tend to be best from the source and government is so much more effective at the local level than perhaps up the food chain farther,” Dill said.
“So I think, let’s let our citizenry in both communities and broader know that we’re committed to what we did today and what we said. That’s not something federal animosity doesn’t need to lead to local animosity and I think we made that clear today.”
