[Provided by Daegu City]
[Provided by Daegu City]

The local era committees of North Gyeongsang Province and Daegu jointly hosted a forum Thursday at Hotel Interbulgo Daegu to discuss the second round of public institution relocations out of the greater Seoul area.

About 30 people attended, including Daegu Mayor Choo Kyung-ho, North Gyeongsang Province Local Era Committee Chair Ha Hye-su, Daegu Local Era Committee Chair Ha Se-heon, and committee members and civil servants from both municipalities. The two sides agreed to work together to accelerate the second round of relocations and promote mutual regional development.

In his opening remarks, Mayor Choo said overcoming the capital-region dominance and addressing the threat of regional depopulation required both the timely opening of the TK New Airport and the attraction of public institutions in the second relocation round. "Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province will cooperate closely to jointly attract public institutions essential to economic and industrial development," he said.

Participants then staged a card-section performance, chanting the slogan "Second relocation of public institutions — Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province, mutual cooperation!" to reaffirm their commitment to working together.

In the strategy presentations that followed, Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province each outlined their regional conditions and development strategies related to the second round of relocations.

Daegu Planning and Coordination Director Oh Jun-hyeok presented a development strategy centered on transitioning to future emerging industries, including AI, robotics and semiconductors. North Gyeongsang Province Local Era Policy Bureau Director Lee Sang-su laid out a vision for an "innovation city where connectivity becomes the economy."

During the subsequent discussion, committee members identified "industry-linked public institution attraction" as the top priority — drawing institutions that can generate synergies with the advanced industries and specialized infrastructure both municipalities have proposed, going beyond simply dispersing agencies across regions.

Participants particularly said that for the government's "5 poles, 3 special zones" national balanced-growth policy to bear fruit, public institution relocations must be distributed fairly according to each region's industrial base and growth potential, rather than being concentrated in specific areas.

Ha Hye-su and Ha Se-heon, the committee chairs for North Gyeongsang Province and Daegu respectively, said the second round of public institution relocations was "a core task on which the region's survival depends and the first step toward broad inter-regional cooperation." They added that they would continue to pool their efforts so that North Gyeongsang Province and Daegu could emerge as central hubs of the local era by attracting public institutions linked to the region's future industries.


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