체육시설 안전을 위한 지방자치단체의 역할

Abstract

Sports for all have become an integral part of the general population’s lives and have become an increasingly important driving force of their healthy lifestyle. After installing the facilities, the facility managing body should focus on implementing safety measures that can safeguard citizens against safety accidents that can occur while using these facilities rather than placing responsibility on user error. The managing body should have the ability to predict and efficiently prevent possible accidents and quickly respond to accidents that occur to promote citizen health and offer good use of leisure. The 「Installation and Utilization of Sports Facilities Act」 allocates the state and local governments the responsibility to make efforts to prepare the necessary institutional systems for the safety of sports facilities and to secure necessary financial resources and establishes the legal basis for safety inspection of sports facilities and establishment of a comprehensive sports facility information system, thereby facilitating the prevention of safety accidents in sports facilities by comprehensively reorganizing the management and supervision system of the facilities, such as allowing the safety management of sports facilities to be delegated to disaster maintenance agency. However, there is no law to enforce sports facility safety inspections, except for the one that allows the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism to delegate them to a disaster maintenance agency. Accordingly, safety inspections are not conducted regularly, and the government is not adequately informed of the safety inspection results from the delegated disaster maintenance agency. As a result, conducting regular safety inspections and properly maintaining these sports facilities that are being used by the entire population is of utmost importance. The number of public sports facilities has increased 5.01 times to 26,927 locations compared to the number from 2000, but 99.8% of these facilities are owned by local governments, while 76.5% are temporary sports facilities that are more prone to cause injury. As the demand for sports facilities follows the population’s increasing interest in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, it is important to offer a safe environment that the population can use by constructing an effective local government governance structure by providing efficient sports facility safety management measures. This study was first conducted due to the frequent accidents that occur following the installation of various sports facilities. Thus, this study suggests enacting necessary ordinances to provide effective safety maintenance and support work that are personalized for each local government organization to cultivate a safe exercise environment for local residents and participate in sports facility safety management and support to better promote sports activities.