Which ministries will be sent to Sejong City?

By Lee Tae-hoon

Staff reporter

The original plan to develop an administrative town in South Chungcheong Province will most likely receive the green light at the National Assembly early next week, but uncertainty lingers on how many and which government ministries would be sent there.

Under a special act on the construction of Sejong City, the backbone of the plan approved in 2005, six ministries were exempt from relocation. They are the Ministries of Unification; Foreign Affairs and Trade; Justice; National Defense; Public Administration and Security; and Gender Equality and Family.

Back then, the ruling and opposition parties had reached an agreement to relocate 12 of the country's 18 ministries to the new town without specifying such details in the bill.

A bone of contention is that the number of ministries has been reduced to 15 due to the Lee Myung-bak administration's drive to make a "slimmer, but more efficient" government, making an amendment to the original plan inevitable.

Opposition lawmakers claim all ministries, excluding the six stated in the legislation, should be relocated to Sejong City, but mainstreamers within the governing Grand National Party (GNP) want to downsize the relocation plan, if they fail to scrap it.

Some of those loyal to President Lee, who sought to overhaul the administrative town project, insist that no more than five to six ministries should be moved from Seoul to Sejong to prevent administrative inefficiency and to not waste tax payers' money.

The specifics of the relocation plan were officially declared by the Roh administration, but with the mergers of ministries and changes in some of the names, the government must publish the new names of the ministries in the government gazette.

Under the special law, the minister of public administration and security has the right to downsize the relocation plan and any change requires the President's approval.

Meanwhile, lawmakers close to President Lee continued their drive to collect signatures in an effort to formally request that bills on the revision of the Sejong development project, rejected by a National Assembly committee earlier this week, are brought to a full parliamentary session for a vote.

They have collected more than 50 signatures and plan to collect 50 more by the weekend.

Under the National Assembly Law, bills can be submitted for a full vote, if 30 lawmakers or more demand it, if they fail to pass a standing committee.

The bills to scrap the original plan, however, will likely be voted down by the Assembly as more than 80 lawmakers of the opposition Democratic Party (DP) and about 50 legislators belonging to the GNP's second largest faction led by former party Chairwoman Park Geun-hye remain opposed to it.

For the passage of the amended bills, it must secure support from at least 146 of the 291 National Assemblymen.