If there were any upside to the passage of Typhoon Fung-wong earlier this week, it was its exposure of the manner in which taxpayers’ money is being spent by Taitung County Commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞).
Despite forecasts that the typhoon would sweep through Taiwan from the east coast, Kuang went ahead with her scheduled trip to Europe last Wednesday.
Coming to Kuang’s defense, the Taitung County Government argued that the delegation had departed days before the Central Weather Bureau issued a typhoon alert.
This explanation is disingenuous, however, because it was already known at the time that a serious storm was headed toward Taitung. And it is the role of a commissioner to be there when locals need her or, to use President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) words, “to feel the pain of the people.”
With the typhoon behind us, we must now turn to what Kuang has been doing with government coffers and how she has spent money on her overseas “business” trips.
While the Taitung County Government faces a deficit of NT$6.1 billion (US$200 million) and lacks the budget to even update its tourism brochures, Kuang has spent millions in the past two years on overseas trips inspecting other countries’ municipal development.
Since her election as county commissioner in April 2006 — with the endorsement of then Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Ma — Kuang has made eight “overseas business trips.”
In 2006, taxpayers footed the bill for her trip to Japan, followed by visits to Greece and Egypt, at a total cost of NT$2.49 million in taxpayers’ money. Kuang made trips to Japan and Hong Kong the following year, followed by an eight-day trip to the UK before she embarked on another visit, this time to Thailand. Taxpayers then paid NT$1.3 million for her trip to New Zealand in April this year, as well as NT$1.5 million for her ongoing 13-day tour in Europe.
And that’s not all. After she comes back, the flight-attendant-turned-commissioner is expected to embark on a trip to Beijing next month for the Beijing Olympics, with a separate trip to Zhejiang Province being planned for September.
Given all this globetrotting, Kuang would be better positioned to write for Lonely Planet than to pen a revised tourism brochure for her county.
The numbers speak for themselves. In the past two years, the county has hosted two large-scale tourism fairs, which brought in some 200,000 tourists and generated NT$400 million. Those numbers, however, pale in comparison with Hualien County, which during the same period hosted more than 10 large-scale tourism fairs and attracted 1 million tourists, who spent an estimated NT$2.1 billion.
Kuang and the Taitung County Government maintain that her trips are meant to better equip her to promote Taitung as a fun tourism destination.
However one looks at it, it is she who seems to be having all the fun.
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