GURI — Guri City in Gyeonggi Province has cut discretionary spending across all departments, including the mayor's office, and reduced event-related costs by as much as 30% in an unprecedented reduction-based supplementary budget. The city said it will redirect the funds to essential spending such as livelihood support and welfare.
Guri said on the 2nd that it had submitted the third supplementary budget bill containing these measures to the city council.
The event budget cuts cover the city's signature Cosmos Festival, its lifelong learning festival and Citizens' Day events. Training costs for public officials and overseas travel expenses were either eliminated entirely or trimmed to a minimum. The mayor's discretionary spending was cut by 20% to a total of 166 million won.
The city said it screened 500 projects that were not immediately urgent, weighing priority, urgency and feasibility of execution.
The overall size of the latest bill is 33.5 billion won larger than the second supplementary budget, but excluding funds already earmarked for specific purposes, such as state and provincial grants, the structure is one in which about 11 billion won was cut from existing project budgets to create essential spending. The city describes it as a reduction budget in substance, even though it appears to be an increase.
The freed-up funds will go to items that directly affect residents' daily lives. The city allocated 5.9 billion won for operating costs of the Subway Line 8 and 3.5 billion won for veterans' honor allowances and transportation and grooming subsidies for older adults. It set aside 1.2 billion won for traditional markets and small business owners, and 480 million won for fuel subsidies for the transport and freight industries.
"We held the line on not touching livelihood budgets that connect directly to residents' lives, such as welfare, and instead focused on cutting administrative costs that do not have to be spent," Guri Mayor Shin Dong-hwa said. "In next year's main budget, we will raise the intensity of spending restructuring further and put weight on increasing revenue sources as well, to get past the current fiscal crisis."
