Korean delegation visits Nome, meets with city officials

Representatives from the South Korean city of Busan, the country’s largest port, visited Nome on January 6 to tour port facilities and discuss opportunities for economic, shipping and academic exchanges.
The delegation was led by  Heong-Joon Park, the mayor of Busan. On Tuesday morning, the visitors were first welcomed in Old St. Joe’s and in the afternoon, they toured port facilities, the Norton Sound Seafood plant and the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum.
At Old St. Joe’s, Port of Nome Director Joy Baker gave a roughly half hour presentation on the Port of Nome expansion to a 19-member delegation that included Head Consul Joongsuk Park of the Korean consulate in Anchorage, the vice consul and a researcher; high level directors with the Busan International Relations Division, media and public information divisions and two journalists with Korean MBC and CBS media.
In attendance from Nome were Mayor Kenny Hughes, Baker, Port Commission members Charlie Lean, Gay Sheffield, Jim West and Nome Common Council members Mark Johnson, Adam Martinson and Scot Henderson. City Manager Lee Smith was not in attendance. No tribal governments or entities were present. 
The visitors handed out gift bags to city officials and attendees at the meeting.
Speaking through a translator, Mayor Park said that Busan is a hub port nationally and internationally. He said that Busan has rapidly growing American industries such as shipbuilding industries. “We aim to work together with the council and the City of Nome, because we all understand that Nome will play a crucial role in terms of pioneering into the Northwest sea route,” his translator said. Park referred to the Northwest Passage as the Northwest sea route. He said they came to Nome to explore cooperation “from small first steps to our big transition in the future.”
The delegates pressed Nome representatives at the meeting with questions about the port and the city’s plans to develop logistic facilities and services.
Charlie Lean, the Vice Chairman of the Port commission, told the delegation that Nome is positioned to become the gateway to the Northwest Passage. “This port is open much longer than those further north, and so that’s going to become a critical point, critical fact that will cause Nome to be a center or a hub,” he said.
Port Director Joy Baker said in response to a question about the port’s operating season that operations in Nome are limited by the ice. “We typically have a five-month season that expands to six months depending on how the ice cooperates, break up in the spring and how soon the ice forms in the fall,” she said.
The delegation had questions about Nome’s potential for shipping logistics development. One question was raised surrounding ship repair – the delegation wanted to know if the Port Commission and City of Nome planned to develop facilities to repair and supply visiting ships with necessary components.
Mayor Hughes said much ship repair and component supply would occur in the private sector and isn’t under government control. “There are opportunities for acquiring the property and building the facilities should there be a company that figures that’s worth doing in Nome, Alaska,” he said.
Hughes said that Busan is a “natural counterpart” to Nome. As Arctic shipping connects Asia and North America directly, these international relationships will become important. “We’re interested in exploring structured cooperation, such as port-to-port collaboration, academic and technical exchanges, fisheries and logistics partnerships and cultural engagement,” he said. 
In an interview with the Nugget, Mayor Park echoed Hughes’ sentiments. He said that Nome will be an important city for developing Arctic trade routes. “We hope that Busan and Nome has new projects [sic] for development route in diverse areas, such as energy, port development, shipping, icebreaker, ship builder [sic] and so we are here for sharing our vision and strategy,” he said. 
In a follow-up interview with the Nugget, Hughes said Nome could benefit from any development, but that specifics are still an ongoing conversation. “So do we have an extremely well-defined plan? Well, see, now that’s the role of private enterprise,” he said. “He who governs least, governs best. We’re really more focused on ensuring that – a regulatory environment that generally protects the public but allows private industry to flourish.”
 
 City Tour
After lunch, delegates piled into two vans for a tour of the city. At the end of the port causeway, passengers piled out of the vehicles to check out the infrastructure. The icy wind did not deter camera crews from setting up for pictures as Baker explained the port to Mayor Park. 
After a drive around port facilities, where the cars looped around the shipping container storage and the fuel tanks, the delegates visited Norton Sound Seafood Products and Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation’s Chief Operating Officer Tyler Rhodes gave a tour of the fish and crab processing plant.
In a statement via email on January 8, Rhodes said, “We were made aware of the group’s visit the day before they came by personnel from the Port of Nome who asked if we would provide a tour of the plant. We provided the brief tour explaining NSEDC’s mission and the operations at the facility. That was the extent of our contact with the group and I do not anticipate any further interaction.” 
Next, the group headed downtown and pointed out City Hall and other Front Street features from the car before heading to Swanberg Dredge. At the dredge, a cold wind was blowing. Mayor Kenny Hughes asked the delegation who would like to stand on Bering Sea ice before taking a group down the snow machine trail onto the ice.
The visitors then headed to the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum. Museum director Cheryl Thompson gave the delegation a tour of the exhibits. After their visit to the museum, when it became clear that the delegation’s plane was delayed, they headed to Airport Pizza to wait out the delay before heading to Anchorage and then on to Las Vegas, Nev., for the Consumer Electronics show.
Mayor Hughes said that the meeting was the first step in establishing a relationship. Hughes said that the South Koreans wanted to come and take a look around Nome after visiting Anchorage. “So, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll accommodate that.’ Might as well get to know more people,” he said. “All things begin with communication, and if you don’t know anybody, it’s difficult to communicate with them.”
Joy Baker, the Port Director, said that she did not know of any plans or agreements that came out of the meeting. “I think it was just a meet and greet to see what they were doing in Busan, and they wanted to see the port and see what an expansion looked like,” she said. “We didn’t have any discussions about partnering…. There wasn’t really anything that came out of it.”
She said that one thing that could come from the meeting was an exchange of ideas.
“They’re much larger city, so how they’re handling their vessel demand and their operations, they could share what they’re experiencing in a larger facility,” she said. “But then it’s a different type of operation, because it’s a different type of government.” 
Emma Pate, the executive director of Nome Eskimo Community, the tribal government for Nome, said that NEC did not receive an invitation to the meeting.
Baker, in an interview with the Nugget on Tuesday, January 12, said that Busan delegation had asked for a meeting with the City of Nome, which is why the meeting was not public and why NEC was not invited. “They asked for a meeting directly with the City of Nome,” she said. She added that if more than three members of either the Nome Common Council or the Port Commission had been in attendance, the meeting would have had to be a public meeting under Alaska’s Open Meetings Act. “The Busan folks requested a direct meeting with the city, so we didn’t make it a public meeting,” she said.
Port Commissioner Gay Sheffield said that the visit should remind Nomeites that the port project is a national and international asset in addition to being important locally.
“I hope that moving forward, our dialogue and planning for this future asset will be much more integrated with our public at local and regional levels, with local and regional governments and entities and business that will have an interest in it one way or another,” she said. 
South Korea already made plans to send a container ship from Busan to Rotterdam via the Northern Sea Route, a voyage which would take the ship through the Bering Strait and along the northern Russian coast to Europe. This is part of the South’s plan to turn Busan into an Arctic shipping hub, as reported this week by High North News.
In addition to Nome, the group visited Anchorage on January 5, signed a Friendship City Agreement with Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance and visited with Governor Mike Dunleavy.