By Lee Se-young

It has been revealed that the budget allocated to Pohang and Ulleung-gun since the inauguration of the Lee administration is approaching 10 trillion won ($8.66 billion). This district is the electoral district of ruling Grand National Party (GNP) Lawmaker Lee Sang-deuk, the elder brother of President Lee Myung-bak. This includes the total cost of projects started since 2009 (about 4.81 trillion won), and projects that started before the Lee administration but were terminated when the Board of Audit and Inspection noted their lack of feasibility, only to be included again in this year’s budget railroaded by the GNP (about 5.16 trillion won), coming to a grand total of almost 9.97 trillion won. This is nine times what Lawmaker Lee has brought into his district over the last three years (about 1.12 trillion won).

The biggest new project in next year’s budget bill is the Pohang-Yeongdeok Highway, which is estimated to cost 2.50 trillion won by the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs. This project includes in the 2011 budget 12.5 billion won in basic planning fees, something that escaped serious attention during the budget screening. Next year’s federal funding for the Pohang-Samcheok railroad is 70 billion won, while the total cost of the project is 2.83 trillion won. The project was begun in 2002, during the Kim Dae-jung administration, but was suspended last year when the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) cited a lack of economic feasibility. Accordingly, it was not included in the government’s original budget bill, but was re-included during the railroaded budgeting process. The Pohang-Ulsan tram project, too, was suspended due to BAI feasibility complaints, but suddenly reappeared: that project will cost 2.33 trillion won.

Besides this, next year’s budget includes 100 billion won for the construction of the Ulsan-Pohang Highway from 2009 through 2014, a project whose total costs is estimated at 1.64 trillion won, as well as 20 billion won for a fourth-generation particle accelerator, a project which will cost a total of 426 billion won. The total cost of the railroad into the new Pohang-Yeongil harbor is 205 billion won, some 130 times what was allocated for it in next year’s budget (1.5 billion won).

The Democratic Party said it is becoming increasingly clear that what has been discussed so far is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the so-called “Big Brother Budgets,” and that an investigation into the feasibility of the projects for which “Big Brother Budgets” have been allocated needs to be conducted. The Democratic Party claims that besides the projects strangely processed in the budget during the railroading process, if you also include social overhead capital projects as pushed normally since before the Lee administration, the total “Big Brother Budget” based on total project costs comes to 12 trillion won.

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Essential Vocabulary:

budget: 예산/allocated to:할당된/tram project: 경전철 건설 프로젝트/audit: 회계 감사