Busan Mayor Jeon Jae-soo speaks at an emergency meeting on a 100-day livelihood action plan held July 1, the day he took office. The meeting was livestreamed in full on the city's official YouTube channel, "Busan Tube." [Busan city government]
Busan Mayor Jeon Jae-soo speaks at an emergency meeting on a 100-day livelihood action plan held July 1, the day he took office. The meeting was livestreamed in full on the city's official YouTube channel, "Busan Tube." [Busan city government]

Busan city government will livestream its weekly policy meeting once a month, opening the session to the public — a compromise that appears to balance Mayor Jeon Jae-soo's pledge at the start of his term to make more meetings public against mounting complaints from frontline civil servants about the burden that transparency has placed on them.

The city announced Monday that starting next month it will livestream the weekly policy meeting on the first Wednesday of each month. The weekly policy meeting brings together senior city officials to share and discuss major municipal agenda items. Through the monthly broadcast, the city plans to inform residents of key policies and projects.

The meeting day will also shift from Monday to Wednesday. Preparing for a Monday meeting had forced civil servants to work on weekends, and Jeon decided to move it to Wednesday to ease that burden on staff.

On July 1, his first day in office, Jeon skipped an inauguration ceremony and instead chaired an emergency meeting on a 100-day livelihood action plan in the main conference room on the first floor of Busan City Hall, broadcasting the entire session live on "Busan Tube," the city's official YouTube channel. He followed that with a livestreamed expanded senior officials' meeting on July 6 and a municipal affairs briefing on July 8, making clear his intention to open major decision-making processes to the public.

The stated aim is to instill a sense of accountability in civil servants and build public trust in the city administration.

Concerns about the livestreamed meetings have nonetheless mounted. Some civil servants said they felt overwhelmed after meeting footage was clipped into short videos stripped of context and spread online. A senior Busan city official said that after meeting scenes were made public, the directors in charge received dozens to hundreds of complaint calls. "When a director was out of the office, staff had to answer the phones and could barely get any work done," the official said.

A city official said by phone that civil servants targeted by abusive YouTube comments had been saying, "This is too much. I'm suffering." The Busan Municipal Civil Servants' Union wrote to the mayor on July 20 asking him to put in place measures to prevent the side effects of open meetings.

The civic group Citizen Together Busan Alliance pushed back in the other direction, issuing a statement on July 23 saying that civil servants paid with taxpayer money were resisting what it called a basic public duty — transparent administration. "If you cannot accept transparency and openness in public administration, step down from public office," the group said, calling for even broader disclosure of meetings.

The debate over whether and how to open municipal meetings to the public is not unique to Busan. Since the June 3 local elections, a growing number of local governments have begun livestreaming their own meetings, and similar problems have emerged in Ulsan, where footage of a senior official being reprimanded spread online and the civil servant involved was subjected to a torrent of malicious comments.

Locally, some see the once-a-month livestream policy as a reasonable compromise — one that advances citizens' right to know and promotes administrative transparency while also acknowledging the need for closed-door sessions and the risk of dampening civil servant morale. A city official said the monthly broadcast would cover policies and agenda items the city wants to share with residents, adding that expanded senior officials' meetings or town hall sessions would also be livestreamed on an irregular basis when circumstances warrant.


kaf2002@heraldcorp.com