Hwaseong Mayor Jeong Myeong-geun announced Wednesday that the city will launch a public-private cooperation body — tentatively named the Hwaseong Donghaeng Organization — in October, billing it as the first of its kind in South Korea.
The Hwaseong Future Vision Committee held a plenary session Wednesday at the Modunurim Center seminar room, where it said the new citizen-governance body would expand citizen-led policy participation and deliver results that residents can feel directly.
The new body is designed to move beyond an era in which city government simply explains policies to residents, toward one of "cooperative governance" in which citizens take part in planning and implementing policy. Its creation fulfills a key campaign pledge Jeong made during the last election.
The city aims to launch the body within 100 days of Mayor Jeong's inauguration and will gather input from civic groups in areas including the environment and community affairs.
From the first half of next year, the city plans to work with residents to identify shared agenda items and run public deliberation processes on major municipal issues and long-pending projects, with the goal of building public trust and strengthening the foundation for public-private cooperation.
"The four years of this term are more important than the past thousand years, so we must think deeply about what to prepare and what results to achieve," Mayor Jeong said.
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