The government's local government system research council, an advisory body to the prime minister, is studying how local governments should operate to maintain administrative services.
This is an important issue with the approach of 2040, which is when severe population decline is expected to begin.
One area of focus is how much the involvement of prefectures and core cities should be increased in areas such as shortages of specialized workers.
The government estimates that the aging of society will peak and depopulation will accelerate around 2040. There are growing concerns that small municipal governments will have difficulty providing administrative services.
With these predictions in mind, the council is discussing how to design systems for local governments around that time. A specialist subcommittee released a summary of the issues on April 7, ahead of a report scheduled for July.
A central issue is assistance for small municipalities. The subcommittee emphasized the need for supplementation by prefectures and for local governments to share human resources and infrastructure.
The new coronavirus pandemic is highlighting the need to support small municipalities.
Chiba Prefecture dispatched staff for two weeks to the town of Tonosho, where an outbreak of more than 100 infections occurred at a welfare facility for people with intellectual disabilities.
The prefecture secured specialized staff from the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and other entities, who provided advice on countermeasures via the dispatched prefectural staff.
"The town staff alone couldn't handle the situation, and thus it was significant that the prefecture was able to provide assistance," a town official in charge of the matter said.
The staff were sent based on the Local Autonomy Act, which allows prefectures to deal with matters that local municipalities cannot. The council's summary points out the need to strengthen systems so prefectures and core cities can more aggressively provide assistance to small municipalities.
In particular, the council is envisioning shortages of specialized staff in areas such as civil engineering, agriculture and disaster management, and proposes that prefectures and core cities increase their number of these staff and promote frameworks for dispatching them to other municipalities.
At an April 23 specialized subcommittee meeting to discuss the summary, which was attended by six regional groups, Hidekiyo Tachiya, mayor of Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, and chair of the Japan Association of City Mayors, said, "We want prefectural governments to exert their authority in a wide-area format."
However, prefectural governments have been cutting staff due to administrative reform and other reasons, which creates issues such as how to pay for adding more specialized staff.
The summary also mentions methods for sharing specialized staff among local governments in wide-area collaborations, and calls on prefectures to play a coordinating role. Yet small municipalities have strong concerns about the concentration of resources in core cities.
University of Tokyo Prof. Tomonobu Hayashi, an expert in local governments, said, "An issue for the future issue is how to consider the concerns of local governments, which do not have a large voice, and actualize measures to solve them."
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