An expert panel on the future of town and village assemblies has proposed allowing municipalities to choose via ordinance from one of three assembly options that would help with their communities' survival.
The expert panel of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry submitted Monday to Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Seiko Noda a report on ways to secure local assembly members.
The report focuses on a new system that would allow local governments to choose from the following three options:
-- Retain their current system.
-- Have an "intensive and professional" assembly comprising a small number of full-time members.
-- Have a "mass participation" assembly comprising a large number of part-time members.
The central government's Local Government System Research Council, an advisory panel to the prime minister, is to consider from now a concrete system incorporating the options, and it aims to submit a bill to revise the Local Government Law and other relevant bills to the ordinary Diet session to be convened in 2019, at the earliest, and pass them into law.
Turning point
"Vitalizing towns and villages will become a beacon for Japan," Noda said, expressing her outlook when she received the report from Meiji University Prof. Tokumi Odagiri, who chairs the expert panel, on Monday. "Having plans to create a new system is important."
The expert panel was set up to study ways to keep local assemblies alive.
The current assembly system has been uniformly applied to all local governments, including prefectures and small towns and villages, irrespective of their population or budget scale.
However, if the new plan is realized, local governments would be allowed to choose their own assembly option for the first time, which would serve as a turning point for the local autonomy system.
Threats to the existence of local assemblies that support local communities in underpopulated areas and other places has served as the impetus for this change.
In the 2015 unified local assembly elections, the ratio of municipalities where assembly members were selected without an election was 27.3 percent among those with a population from 1,000 to 9,999 and 64.7 percent among those with a population of less than 1,000. The less populated a municipality was, the higher the ratio.
Among towns and villages, the number of seats per municipality has declined by about four, on average, over the past decade. The assembly with the fewest members is the five-member Kitadaito village assembly in Okinawa Prefecture.
"There is a limitation to how much we can simply reduce assembly seats," a senior ministry official said.
Voters' will
The "mass participation" assembly plan is aimed at allowing more people to become assembly members while also making more people eligible to run for assembly member seats by easing a regulation on local assembly members having more than one post or having other jobs. It will become possible to elect company officials doing business with local governments and to elect officials of nearby municipal governments.
Under the plan, assembly sessions will be held at night or on holidays, when assembly members are done with their main jobs, in principle. Employers will be prohibited from discriminating against employees when they take days off from work to run for election or perform duties as an assembly member.
In addition, the Public Offices Election Law will be revised to allow the opinions of residents in each district to be reflected.
Establishing electoral districts based on small communities or elementary school districts will also be considered.
In the "intensive and professional" assembly plan, the number of assembly seats will be reduced from whatever the current number is to guarantee the living wages of the members. It will also introduce a system to select people to participate in assembly deliberations via a lottery so the opinions of women, youth and other people will be reflected.
In addition, currently, if public servants run for election, they lose their jobs.
Therefore, the panel proposed introducing a system that would allow such public servants to return to work to make it easier for them to run.
The village of Okawa, Kochi Prefecture, had discussed a plan to set up a "village general meeting" wherein voters would directly discuss ordinance bills and other issues instead of an assembly. In response to that, the ministry panel was established.
Concerning this, the panel concluded it would be difficult to effectively hold a meeting in which all residents could meet due to the community's aging population, among other reasons.
From here on, the government will move to design the three options in concrete. It will be a challenge to create criteria that would draw a line between municipalities eligible to choose the new systems and those not.
For small communities only?
The ministry is considering introducing the new system only in small municipalities with populations of less than 10,000.
However, coordinating views will be difficult, with a senior ministry official saying: "It's impossible to draw a line, without exception, based on the population scale. It will be imperative to take into account respective local conditions such as fiscal strength and the rate of the population aging."
Nobuo Sasaki, a professor of public administration at Chuo University, said, "Compared to the current uniform assembly system, municipalities will have more options, which is a step forward.
"The mass participation assembly plan has many issues, as it could deteriorate the assembly's monitoring functions, such as easing regulations regarding having a side job and the diminishing of the assembly's authority. Thus, it is essential to deepen discussions regarding this in the future."
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