It came as no surprise when the Pingtung County government, prioritizing economics as usual, recently completed the procedures for a so-called “legal” environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the Yoho Beach Resort in Kenting National Park.
The resort has been operating illegally for 14 years, and despite the concerns of environmental organizations and academics who have been researching the resort’s impact on the local marine ecology, it will now be able to operate legally.
Regardless of whether it is central or local government, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) or the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in power, the government automatically takes the side of big business.
This is also why big business finds it so easy to rob people of their land and openly destroy and pollute farmland, natural resources and the environment that they rely on.
The Yoho Beach Resort, originally built as an apartment complex, has been illegally operating as a hotel.
Last April, after media reports, sections three to six of the resort were ordered to close.
However, on the morning of Oct. 12 last year, between 10am and 11am, when hotels are at their busiest, there was no sign that business had been affected.
The place was packed with guests getting ready to check out.
Despite online media reports featuring pictures of receipts from the resort showing that it is still in business, officials from Pingtung County Tourism Bureau — who should be punishing the hotel — appear on television excusing the hotel.
First, county officials did this to cover up for the hotel and second, to shirk responsibility for their failure to monitor the complex properly.
How can the public be expected to believe that the county government is carrying out EIAs sincerely and ensuring that the resort complies with their commendations based on assessments?
According to a long-term study conducted by Allen Chen (陳昭倫) and his colleagues from Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center, coral cover, capable of supporting fishing stocks in Kenting’s Wanlitung (萬里桐) coastal area, has plummeted from 46.57 percent to 17.49 percent cover over the last decade, a period over which the population of the area actually shrank.
The only new source of pollution at that time was wastewater coming from the Yoho resort that was not being monitored, since the resort was operating illegally.
A few years after the resort started operating, coral in the nearby waters started to die. The resort’s operators have denied that there is a connection, yet the timing is difficult to ignore.
To solve this problem, the county government conditionally passed an EIA, which was conducted on the resort with an understanding that it would reduce wastewater emissions to zero.
That EIA report also explicitly stipulated a set of emissions standards for everyday water use — including even stricter than legally acceptable levels — that the resort had to comply with before the zero emission target was achieved.
As a result, the then-chairman of the EIA committee, who also happened to be the head of the Pingtung County Environmental Protection Bureau, bragged that the everyday-use water emission standards they were requiring the resort to comply with were the highest in the country.
However, figures show that the amount of water used by each tourist per day far exceed the amount used by a single person per day in an average household setting.
This begs the question of just how much wastewater the resort must reclaim daily given that it is situated in a hot area, with 410 rooms, a high occupancy rate and guests using water for bathing and washing, not to mention water used for meal preparation as well as swimming pools.
It is also important to ask the following questions: What are the processing capabilities of the wastewater processing and reclamation equipment? What is the recycled water used for? Is it used for tourists to bathe in, or is the water used to wash dishes and clean the food consumed at the hotel? Is it used to water plants? Or, is the water used for all of the above because large amounts of water are being reclaimed? Will the hotel say it is using wastewater to water plants all the while actually allowing it flow into the surrounding environment? Is the hotel operator able to disclose exactly what it is doing with the water and comply with requirements?
These questions remain unanswered.
Hoping the Kenting National Park Headquarters and the county government will monitor the resort after letting it get away with so many things for so long is futile.
In order to regain the trust of the public, the park headquarters, the county government and the hotel operator will have to open up and let local NGOs monitor the complex and see if it really is meeting the conditions of the EIA it supposedly passed.
The only question is whether these three parties are willing to do this.
Chan Shun-kuei is a lawyer and chairman of the Environmental Jurists Association.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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