From the 1950s to 2020, fire fighting activities have changed from the traditional fire prevention and suppression to the response to various incidents and disasters such as rescue, first aid, terrorism, and life safety. As a result, the need for the ...
From the 1950s to 2020, fire fighting activities have changed from the traditional fire prevention and suppression to the response to various incidents and disasters such as rescue, first aid, terrorism, and life safety. As a result, the need for the transition from the fire fighting of metropolitan and provincial governments to the national fire fighting was constantly raised from the 1990s, and the nationalization for fire officials was implemented from April 1, 2020 with active social and political atmosphere and support in line with the necessity of improving the treatment of fire officials and boosting their morale.
The nationalization of fire fighting secured a balance of values between the 'national responsibility' and 'local decentralization' for the safety of the people by maintaining the authority over personnel affairs (delegation) and command and control rights of existing city and provincial governors while expanding manpower and providing financial support at the national level.
The main contents are: First, by nationalizing existing local fire officials, all fire officials were unified into national fire officials.
Second, in order to narrow the regional gap in fire fighting services, the Act on the Establishment of Fire-Fighting Financial Support and Special Accounts for City and Provincial Fire-Fighting Systems (abbreviated as the Fire-Fighting Accounting Act) was enacted and the Local Subsidy Tax Act was amended to recruit 20,000 insufficient field fire fighters and to establish a unified standard for securing fire-fighting funds.
Third, with the aim of strengthening the national responsibility for disasters to be dealt with at the national level, the right to command and supervise for fire commissioner of national fire agency, head of fire and disasters headquarters, and chief of the fire station was newly established in the Frame affairs Act on Fire fighting.
Fourth, to improve the treatment of fire officials, a complex healing center could be built as a specialized medical institution for fire fighting.
However, even though the true meaning of nationalization of fire fighting should be that not only the status but also the affairs and the organizations and budgets derived from it should be placed under the responsibility and supervision of the central government, the relationship of authority can be interpreted in various ways depending on the purpose and situation of the individual law without a clear analysis of the characteristics of fire-fighting affairs between the fire department and the city and the province.
First, in Article 9 paragraph 2 of the Local Autonomy Act, fire-fighting affairs are referred to as local government affairs, which contradicts the meaning of nationalization.
Second, it is concerned that the personnel management and financial burden will be dualized, which will lead to inefficiency in carrying out fire-fighting affairs and increase the sense of alienation from relevant departments in cities and provinces
Third, the general command and supervision rights of the city and provincial governors under Article 3, Paragraph 2 of the Framework Act on Fire fighting and the command and supervision rights of the fire commissioner of the National Fire Agency under Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the same Act will conflict with each other.
In order to improve the above problems, the first thing to do is to analyze the characteristics of fire-fighting affairs and discuss personnel, financial, command and supervision relations according to the results.
First of all, the analysis of the characteristics of affairs derived from each clause of the 16 laws related to fire fighting showed 111 cases of the national affairs (35.8 percent), 107 cases of joint affairs (34.5 percent), and 92 cases of local affairs (29.6 percent) in the total 310 cases of fire fighting affairs. In addition, if safety is regarded as the basic rights of the people (Article 34, Paragraph 6 of the Constitution), the indispensable fire-fighting affairs directly related to life is equivalent to the affairs that requires the unification and adjustment of standards across the country. Therefore, fire fighting affairs shall be removed from local affairs under Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Local Autonomy Act.
Accordingly, fire prevention command supervision clause of fire commissioner on the Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the Framework Act on Firefighting and Direct organization articles of the fire department under the direct control of the city and provincial governor on the Article 3, Paragraph 4 of the Framework Act on Fire fighting that are possibility of undermining the city-province partnership should be removed in terms of personnel management.
And in order to secure permanent and stable financial resources from the financial perspective, the personnel expenses of fire officials should be covered by the fire safety grant tax, and the fire-fighting policy project should be covered at a certain rate, considering that fire-fighting affairs are mixed with national and local affairs. In the long run, the government needs to consider securing funds from fire insurance taxes for the shortfall caused by the special fire safety grant tax.
Finally, confusion over command and supervision in the event of a major disaster should be approached from the perspective of "mission-type command," which sees the command system as a horizontal authority delegation relationship rather than a "control-type command" that sees the command system as a vertical top-down relationship. For this purpose, fire-fighting culture should be transformed into a culture of mutual trust based on autonomous leadership, and manuals reflecting the mission-type command system should be produced and training based on them should be conducted repeatedly.