Allegations of illegality that emerged during former Shinan County Chief Park Woo-ryang's tenure through the seventh and eighth popularly elected terms will now be examined through an investigation. Large-scale summonses of the former county chief as well as government officials appear inevitable.
Shinan County Chief Kim Tae-sung spoke Wednesday about the investigation request. "We cannot open a new future for Shinan without breaking away from the abnormal administration of the past," he said. "This investigation request is a promise to the county's residents to establish clean county governance based on fairness and common sense, and a starting point toward an honest Shinan."
Shinan County requested investigations into a total of three cases: a public property exchange, the construction of secure housing for salt farm workers, and a donated-tree project.
The public property exchange was pursued to secure a site for an urban forest project for climate response in Jido, carried out with national funding support. In this case, circumstances emerged suggesting the project was pushed through excessively, with trees planted in advance without obtaining consent for land use, effectively treating a land exchange with a specific individual as a done deal.
The secure housing project for salt farm workers aimed to improve workers' poor living conditions, using national funding to build a 15-unit (based on two people) facility in the Janggam-ri area of Aphae-eup. Violations of related laws including the Local Autonomy Act, the Local Subsidy Act, and the Local Contract Act have reportedly been confirmed.
For the donated-tree project, from 2020 the county received donations of about 60 tree species totaling 1,678,905 trees, including hackberry trees, under the pretext of creating a premium hackberry tree road and other purposes, with total project costs of approximately 42.9 billion won executed. However, according to Shinan County, by having the county bear the entire cost of ancillary expenses such as digging up and transporting the donated trees, the project lacked transparency in budget execution and caused a serious burden on the local government's finances.
Ordinary tree planting requires selecting a contractor through open bidding under the Local Contract Act, based on a design document. However, lawful procedures were omitted, and tree planting was handled directly by the county through in-house operation.
Separately from the investigation request, Shinan County's audit division will conduct a large-scale audit of the projects overall to root out administrative opacity and the waste of taxpayer money.
