Hong Nampyo, Changwon Special City Mayor, "Focused Investment on Economic Revitalization and Securing Future Growth Engines"

In the Financial Strategy Meeting: "Even Amid Resource Shortages,
Next Year's Budget Will Be Allocated as Needed to Essential Areas"

"Despite the shortage of available resources, we will focus on investing intensively in economic revitalization and securing future growth engines. The projects planned for next year will be carried out by saving budgets allocated to other projects, so we must prepare well to ensure they proceed smoothly as planned."

Hong Nampyo, Mayor of Changwon Special City in Gyeongnam, made these remarks at the 2nd Financial Strategy Meeting held on the 25th.

Hong Nampyo, Mayor of Changwon Special City, is explaining the budget for next year.

This meeting was convened to discuss the overall budget plan for next year, expenditure restructuring details, and key investment projects as the adjustment of the 2024 main budget proposal entered its final stage, based on the results of the 1st Financial Strategy Meeting held last September.

Changwon City has already announced that it will continue to maintain a "sound fiscal" policy for next year's financial management in response to unprecedented fiscal deterioration caused by a decline in tax revenue. In fact, the revenue estimate for the main budget shows that the income from transfer resources such as local grants and adjustment grants for 2024 decreased by 163.2 billion KRW from the initially estimated 1.1061 trillion KRW to 942.9 billion KRW.

Accordingly, to resolve the fiscal difficulties, the city implemented high-intensity restructuring of the next year's budget based on discussions from the 1st Financial Strategy Meeting, drastically cutting and adjusting budgets that are not absolutely necessary, reducing expenditure demands exceeding revenue estimates by 630 billion KRW.

Key expenditure restructuring details include ▲ reflecting monthly progress and amounts for large-scale investment projects in the budget ▲ conducting financial reviews of large projects over 2 billion KRW, adjusting the direction of 42 projects through schedule changes, consolidation, and condition reviews ▲ allocating only essential minimum expenses for operating costs such as business promotion expenses ▲ and cutting excessive demands for recurring expenses like publicity and consumables.

Private subsidy projects also underwent significant restructuring. By analyzing support status by subsidy organizations, subsidy projects were categorized to consolidate similar and overlapping projects, and about 540 subsidy projects were reduced or abolished through checks on normal results and self-payment ratios.

Additionally, starting next year, the subsidy project selection process will be strengthened by establishing the principle of selecting subsidy recipients through public contests for new projects and specifying the duration of subsidy projects to fundamentally prevent repeated annual support of once-selected subsidy projects as a routine.

Given these circumstances, the budget growth rate for Changwon City next year is expected to be lower than usual. However, the city plans to focus fiscal investment on promoting key pledge projects, economic revitalization, and securing future growth engines with the budget savings from expenditure restructuring, ensuring that essential tasks proceed without interruption.

After this 2nd Financial Strategy Meeting, Changwon City will finalize the 2024 main budget proposal through public disclosure and final adjustment work in November and submit the budget proposal to the council.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.