Pocheon Mayor Kim Jong-cheon Rolls Up Sleeves to Solve Regional Issues

Pocheon City (Mayor Kim Jong-cheon) submitted recommendations to the Presidential Secretariat on July 7th, requesting government-wide measures to address the region's most pressing issues: damages from military firing ranges and residential conflicts resulting from coal-fired power generation collective energy projects.

The key contents of the recommendations concern military firing range damages. Pocheon is home to approximately 50 square kilometers of firing ranges, including the Rodriguez Range, the world's largest U.S. military comprehensive firing range, and the Seungjin Range, the largest firing range in East Asia.

Continuous firing training day and night, including early mornings, has left residents in a state of psychological panic, with damage to homes and public facilities, livestock miscarriages, and shrapnel falling on farmland and 105mm bombs landing on homes, creating a dire situation where residents live their entire lives in mortal danger. The Firing Range Countermeasures Committee has been staging protests at the firing range entrance for over 600 days to make the citizens' desperate situation known.

Regarding issues related to coal-fired power generation collective energy project construction, Pocheon City is located in the center of the Korean Peninsula and is surrounded by mountains, forming a basin-like topography where dispersed fine dust tends not to spread to other regions, resulting in higher atmospheric pollutant concentrations. Despite being announced as the region with the highest fine dust concentration nationwide in various statistics and media reports, two complex thermal power plants (LNG) have recently been constructed, producing 2,410MW of electricity.

Furthermore, a collective energy supply facility in Shinbuk-myeon Jangja General Industrial Complex in Pocheon City, with a capacity of 550t/h for heat and 169.9MW for electricity production using bituminous coal as fuel, is 72% complete and is scheduled to commence commercial operation upon completion in August 2018. Additionally, the transport route for the fuel, bituminous coal, is imported through the Incheon Port via the Seoul metropolitan area.

Therefore, Pocheon City strongly demanded that the central government change the fuel from bituminous coal to liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Since taking office on April 13th, Mayor Kim Jong-cheon of Pocheon City has been making multifaceted efforts from all angles to resolve these pending issues, including visits to Gyeonggi Province and the National Assembly.