Good evening, Mayor Santos and City Council Members.

 
The Human Relations Committee will be making a recommendation to the City Council tonight to adopt the Draft San Leandro Friendship City Guidelines. My name is Arlene Lum, and today, I am representing the Friendship City Committee and ask for your adoption of the Guidelines.

 
Several months ago, the Asian Business Council of the San Leandro Chamber was approached by one of the Chinese Associations asking if we in San Leandro are interested in forming a Sister City or Friendship City relationship with Yangchun, China. We pulled together a small group of business and community leaders to evaluate the proposal and develop a plan.

 
We found that the City of San Leandro has 3 Sister Cities: one with a city in Brazil, one with a city in the Azores Island, and the last, Naga in the Philippines, which was approved over 18 years ago.  

 
To help us assess the need for a Sister City or Friendship City relationship, we looked at the growing Chinese population in San Leandro. We found that the Asian population grew from almost non-existent 35 years ago to an estimate of over 20,000 today, about 26% of the total San Leandro population. Most of the growth took place within the last decade with the new housing developments such as Heron Bay and Marina Vista. The majority of the San Leandro Asian population are ethnic Chinese.
 

If the growth in the San Leandro population surprises you, the growth in the San Leandro Asian-owned businesses will really blow you away. Prior to 1991, there were only 65 Asian-owned businesses in San Leandro. I should clarify that this represents business licenses that were taken out by Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese-owned businesses. Between 1991-2000, we added 180 new Asian-owned businesses. In the 6.5 years since 2000 , we added another 614 Asian-owned businesses, an 251% increase over the previous 10 years while non-Asian businesses only experienced a 74% increase.  What’s staggering is that 20% of today’s 859 Asian-owned businesses were established within the last 12 months, the majority of them owned by ethnic Chinese. Asian-owned businesses represent 16% of the total 5,230 San Leandro businesses.

 
With such a huge percentage of the San Leandro population being Chinese and the astronomical growth in new Asian-owned businesses, we feel it is time to form some kind of relationship with China so that we can help enrich the cultural sensitivities of our residents and perhaps take advantage of economic development opportunities as a result of these relationships. We urge the City Council to adopt the San Leandro Sister City and Friendship City Guidelines. 

 
Arlene Lum
Friendship City Committee, Chairperson
Pidato dari Hendy Huang:
Mayor and City Councilmembers,
I would like to address that the community would like to have this relationship between San Leandro and Cities in China. In the last few weeks, I circulated these petitions. There are voices from our community, that is
1. want to have more business in San Leandro
2. Want to have more Asian Business in San Leandro
3. Want to have more Chinese Business and Chinese Stores  in San Leandro
4. No more parcel tax.
5. More diversity cultures.
6. want to know more about Chinese Culture
7. Ask for a Chinese Senior Center, so they don’t have to go to Oakland Chinatown or San Francisco Chinatown’s senior center.

 
Speaking of cultures, I would like to see if we can have the culture exchange between two cities, such as
1.Exchange cultural performance from communities or schools between two cities.
2.Exchange Summer school program between San Leandro and cities in China. It is a challenging for our children here, to learn how kids study at school in China. This is an opportunity for our education improvement.
3.Exchange home stay program between two cities, to learn and to exchange cultures from the local family, and make friendship.
 

For the business exchange, I would like to see the import from China to San Leandro, and export our product to China. In the future, we will have more import products from Asia Countries. That is the time we need to build a Chinese Shopping Mall, or Asian Shopping Mall. We will have import products from all over the Asia Pacific Coast, that is from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippine, Malaysia, Singapore, and the far south east is Indonesia-- the place I was born there. People from San Francisco, San Jose, Vallejo, and Sacramento will come to shop in San Leandro. In addition to Downtown San Leandro Development, San Leandro will became the business headquarter in the bay area. The more business we have in San Leandro, the more people come to shop in San Leandro, and the more sale tax go to our city hall and school district. Then we don’t need anymore parcel tax in the future.
 

Tonight, I represent the Chinese Community of San Leandro, and  the Community of San Leandro, all different groups of cultures, to submit these signed petition for a “Friendly City Relationship Between San Leandro and Cities in China.”  I collected the total of 203 signature petitions, In addition, we submitted 525 signed petitions on May 31, which overall total of 728 signatures.
 

Thank you.
Hendy Huang.
Chinese Community in San Leandro (CCSL), Chairperson

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Good evening Mayor Santos and all city council members: