Haitian Mayors Visit Rockland County

New York, NY —

Just after UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon urged the Security Council to keep peacekeeping troops in Haiti at least another year, elected officials in Rockland County are delivering a different kind of aid - 6 Haitian mayors will spend a long weekend in Ramapo and Spring Valley to get tips on how better to run their cities. WNYC's Marianne McCune reports.

REPORTER: No Rockland County mayor deals with anything close to the poverty and violence of Haiti's largest slum - Cite Soleil. Mayor Benoit Gustav says he and UN peace keepers are working hard to bring calm to the area. Now he wants to focus on problems of education and housing.

GUSTAV: (in French) We need to construct modern houses for our citizens. It's a complete shanty-town and we need to replace it with a new city.

REPORTER: We need to construct modern houses for our residents, he says, It's a complete shanty-town and we need to replace it with a new city. Gustav and the five other mayors are shuttling between the offices of city planners, police and educators to try to absorb how American administrators work. This is the 2nd group of mayors to come from Haiti. Spring Valley trustee Joseph Desmaret says the idea is to show them that running a city in Haiti could and should involve more than payroll and garbage pick up. Take zoning for example.

DESMARET: People build wherever they want to and the municipality does not have any control over it. When they come here, we explained them how we do things here, it was amazing.

Desmaret organized the exchange - he is himself a Haitian immigrant and there are more than 11,000 in the area. The Town of Ramapo also plans to help Haiti's capital develop its solid waste management system. And this weekend, the town will hold a school supplies drive for the children of Cite Soleil. For WNYC, I'm Marianne McCune