The way Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) has handled a controversial project to relocate a segment of railway track running through the city’s downtown underground has critics accusing him of flouting the democratic process.
Lai’s action has already drawn comparisons with former Miaoli County commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻), who forcibly demolished four houses in Dapu Borough (大埔) in 2013 to make way for the expansion of a science park, thus becoming the most notorious name in the nation’s land seizure conflicts.
The mayor has been imposing his preference for a proposal drafted by the Railway Reconstruction Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications in 2007 to move the railway underground and to have the tracks built further to the east. As this would result in the expropriation of 5.1 hectares of land belonging to 407 households, the Tainan Underground Railway Self-Help Association has suggested relocating the railway tracks right beneath their original location, similar to the idea put forward by the Executive Yuan in 1996.
Lai was accused of acting like a dictator at the city government’s urban planning commission meeting on Thursday last week.
At the meeting presided over by Lai to review the project, three of the five members of the self-help association, including spokesperson Chen Chih-hsiao (陳致曉), who were eventually allowed to take part in the closed-door meeting, were dragged out of the conference room by police after Lai objected to Chen talking for more than his allotted three minutes.
Lai then announced that the 2007 proposal has cleared the city government’s commission and referred it to the Ministry of the Interior for further review, in the absence of Chen and two of his colleagues, who were locked in the stairwell.
It is not the first time since Lai became mayor in 2010 that he has been accused of trying to fend off questions that challenged the expropriation policy, including whether it was legitimate to have the 1996 version replaced by the 2007 version when the affected community was not consulted, how the public welfare and necessity in the planned expropriation were weighed and how the city government would benefit from developing the land.
Lai has tried to keep clear of the questions by saying that the role of the city government in this case is limited to an auxiliary one because it is the Railway Reconstruction Bureau that is in charge of the project.
However, during his term as a lawmaker, Lai had requested that the bureau evaluate the possibility of the east side of the current tracks being demolished to make room for the underground railway. Moreover, soon after he was elected mayor in 2010, he directed then-Tainan deputy mayor Charles Lin (林欽榮) to look into the purpose and designation of the state-owned land surrounding the 5.1-hectare area and the possibility of changing its classification to provide for development projects.
This suggests that the city government, led by Lai, has played an active — rather than just a supporting — role in facilitating the 2007 proposal.
Earlier this year, when Lai began his ongoing boycott of all city council meetings until the vote-buying charges against Tainan City Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) were resolved, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) city councilors called him a dictator who showed a lack of respect for judicial and democratic systems. However, the vote-buying scandal made Lai’s boycott somehow morally justifiable.
Lai then promised to “open the government” to public scrutiny and allow greater public participation in its decisionmaking process.
His commitments to the pledges have been cast into deep doubt.
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