Fourth, Article 12 of the Act states that the central government, governments of municipalities and governments of cities and counties must keep residents from living in dangerous areas and that the government should plan special areas and make it compulsory for whole villages to move to designated safe zones, where the residents can be placed in suitable housing.
However, this could cause some problems for the government. Senior officials have promised some flood victims that they will rebuild their homes but what happens if academics and experts evaluating these areas deem them unsuitable for reconstruction? The government should ask itself whether it only has the two choices of rebuilding villages or relocating them to other areas or whether they can take other actions, such as temporarily placing flood victims in a certain area and allowing them to go back to their villages on weekends.
Fifth, the government did not declare a state of emergency this time around and the special act makes no mention of how administrative procedures can be simplified. Complicated and lengthy, time-consuming administrative procedures are the biggest hindrance to reconstruction projects that need efficiency and strong action.
The Temporary Statute for Post-Earthquake Reconstruction had a whole chapter that listed the details of the execution of administrative procedure and ways in which it could be simplified, which helped reconstruction efforts greatly.
Sixth, the Temporary Statute for Post-Earthquake Reconstruction was very detailed and had a total of 75 articles, whereas the Act only has 25. Of course we cannot judge legislative quality by the number of articles a particular law has. However, there is no way a few articles can cover what is needed to fix the scope of damage caused by Morakot and the difficulty that will be involved in reconstruction.
Tsai Jung-hsiang is an assistant professor of political science at National Chung Cheng University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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