Jeong Cheong-rae, leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, speaks at the Supreme Council meeting held at the National Assembly on the 17th. Kim Kyung-ho, senior reporter [email protected].
The Democratic Party announced on the 17th that it will increase the importance of morality for mayors and local councilors in the evaluation criteria for elected public officials and expand the scope of evaluation from immediate family to include extended family and close associates.
The Democratic Party’s Elected Public Officials Evaluation Committee stated in a press release that, “With the increasing moral expectations for high-ranking public officials, we have raised the importance of morality for both mayors and local councilors, and expanded the scope of evaluation to include extended family and close associates beyond just immediate family.”
Regarding evaluations of regional and local mayors, the Evaluation Committee explained that, “Given the increasing importance of mayors’ roles during various crises, efforts for crisis response, as well as preventive measures and lessons learned from failures, have been included as evaluation criteria.” Additionally, it has incorporated into the evaluation innovative policy administration that assesses innovative, challenging, and creative administrative cases, efforts for seamless regional policy implementation through party-government cooperation, efforts for regional revitalization that consider the population crisis, such as attracting people to rural areas, businesses, and youth startups, and efforts to protect the human rights of civil servants regarding excessive complaints, which have recently emerged as a problem.
The Evaluation Committee also mentioned that in relation to the evaluation of regional and local councilors, “We have increased the weighting for legislative and fiscal achievements and administrative oversight, which are core to the legislative activities of local councilors.” It added, “We included communication with residents for regional development and the continuous public deliberation process on specific agendas in the evaluation indicators and adjusted the weighting upward.”