Residents near Pohang eco-village site boycott public hearing, demand full review of candidate locations

Residents of Ocheon-eup are pushing back against a planned eco-village project being pursued by the city of Pohang in North Gyeongsang Province.

The Ocheon-eup Emergency Committee Against the Daesong-myeon Eco-Village Site held a protest rally Friday outside the Pohang Agricultural Education and Welfare Center, where a public hearing on the strategic environmental impact assessment was taking place, and announced a full boycott of the session.

The committee said both candidate sites examined in the draft assessment — in Singwang-myeon and Daesong-myeon — raise environmental concerns, and called on the city to scrap the current site-selection process entirely and start over rather than presenting one location as a relatively preferable alternative.

The committee said that while the planned development falls within Daesong-myeon administratively, its environmental effects could extend to neighboring Ocheon-eup residents, whose views were not adequately reflected in the site-selection process.

After holding the outdoor protest rally at 9:30 a.m. Friday, the committee moved around 11 a.m. to the Oeo Temple trail near the proposed eco-village site in Ocheon-eup, where members carried out an environmental cleanup.

"Both candidate sites have been flagged for environmental suitability problems, yet Pohang city is pushing ahead on the logic that Daesong-myeon is relatively better," a committee representative said. "Because the voices of directly affected residents have been excluded, the site selection must be fully reconsidered until environmental concerns are resolved."