EDITORIAL: Autonomy of citizenry

Three years ago, Ikeda, a bedroom community in Osaka Prefecture, created a way for residents to help decide what happens to the city budget.

Under the system, local community promotion councils set up in each of the city's 11 elementary school districts can propose tax-financed services for the community.

The council members are local residents who are selected from among all those who apply. Each school district is allowed to make proposals worth up to about 7 million yen a year. Among their proposals adopted to date are the purchase of a vehicle to enable residents to conduct anti-crime patrols, a project to install a lawn on the playground of an elementary school and a program to deliver meals to elderly residents of the area.

This unique system allows residents to have a direct say in how taxpayer money, although just a small portion of the budget, should be spent. The aim of this initiative, Mayor Kaoru Kurata said, is to stress the importance of citizen involvement in their own community.

"This requires citizens to have more control over the way taxpayer money is used and to contribute their own labor," Kurata says. Kurata intends to increase the amount of money available for each district, so that each can include more costly projects, such as renovating an elementary school gym.

Ikeda's undertaking is focused on promoting local community initiatives. In contrast, the city of Ichikawa in Chiba Prefecture focuses on objectives.

Its program, introduced five years ago, allows citizens to direct the use of 1 percent of their resident tax payments to financially support citizen groups of their choosing.

Senior citizens who live on government pensions also wanted to participate in the program, so Ichikawa set up a way to convert points earned through designated volunteer activities into money that can support citizen groups. The system has made it possible for more citizens to join in.

In fiscal 2009, Ichikawa residents' efforts provided 21 million yen ($236,000) to 130 groups, including nonprofit organizations.

What led to these two programs was the fiscal crunch that local governments are fighting. As fiscal and administrative reforms alone cannot cure fiscal woes, local governments had to seek out new ways to involve residents in local administration.

Meanwhile, more citizens are showing a willingness to support local public services. This trend reflects the growing social movement to rebuild local communities.

Abiko in Chiba Prefecture has solicited proposals from residents to privatize or contract out each of the roughly 1,100 tasks the municipal government carries out. The city evaluated the proposals to determine whether each should be done by the government or a private-sector service provider from the viewpoint of taxpayer interest. So far, 37 proposals have been adopted, including prenatal education classes for pregnant women and other courses at community centers.

Those three cities are not the only ones attempting to review their bloated administrative services. But such initiatives would be meaningless if private-sector service providers act only as subcontractors for local governments.

Administrative services tend to be uniform and follow typical bureaucratic style, so it is important to develop new types of services tailored to the needs of the local community.

To make a difference, citizens must have access to all the relevant information about local government operations, including the formulation of budgets.

They also need to have more say concerning how their tax money is spent, while providing their own labor for their communities.

Citizens should urge the local government to make better use of the resources in the community and to work the way they want it to work. Such changes would be in step with the "new form of public sector" advocated by the administration of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

While further decentralization will transfer more power and fiscal resources from the central government to local authorities, this trend won't do much good for residents if it only makes local government chiefs more powerful. To ensure decentralization produces the promised benefits, it is essential that citizens take the lead in public services in their communities.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 1