Wardens want Ma impeached

The DPP's Taipei City chapter yesterday led the party's Taipei borough wardens to the Control Yuan to submit a request to have Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) impeached because he illegally postponed the city's borough-warden elections. The elections were postponed from June 8 last year to Jan. 8 this year.

The impeachment request, endorsed by 68 DPP borough wardens, was accepted by three Control Yuan members, Chan Yi-chang (詹益彰), Lee Shen-yi (李伸一) and Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄), who said they would jointly investigate the case.

The director of the DPP's Taipei City chapter, Huang Ching-lin (黃慶林), said yesterday that "the Taipei City Government had obviously violated the law by postponing the borough-warden elections -- using the rezoning of boroughs as an excuse. All other boroughs in Taiwan had completed their warden elections on June 8 last year.

The fact that Taipei City was the only area to have its borough-warden elections delayed, jeopardized the nation's legal institutions."

"Ma's excuse that the boroughs were being rezoned, was insufficient because only a very few boroughs were affected by the rezoning project and this means there was no justification to postpone the elections," Lin said.

The case for impeachment was filed after the Grand Justices made a constitutional interpretation on Dec. 20.

One borough warden, Shih Mu-pin (施木彬) from the Kuo-shun Borough, yesterday said, "Ma used the rezoning of boroughs to justify postponing the borough-warden elections which increased his chances in December's mayoral elections."

"His sole purpose was to please the old borough wardens, who served as his vote captains," Shih said.

Shih also said that the borough-rezoning was initially requested by some of the city's borough wardens to have certain boroughs rezoned because they were too big and needed to be divided into smaller areas. But the proposal was turned down by the city government.

"But then the city government suddenly announced it would rezone the boroughs, shortly before the June 8 national borough-warden elections."

"The city government was ambivalent in its stance toward the rezoning project. It objected to the project at first, but changed its mind later on. But the eventual rezoning was not what we asked for," Shih said.

"Taking the Kuo-shun Borough as an example, the original borough was small enough, but half the borough was cut off and merged with a neighboring borough governed by a KMT borough warden," said Shih, "there was no need at all to further divide the small borough."

"This resulted in the invalidation of the tenure of the previous warden of the Kuo-shun Borough, because her household registration fell in the jurisdiction of another borough after the rezoning.

As a result, she couldn't get her retirement pension, even though she had served for more than four years -- the official tenure period for borough wardens," Shih said.

The Grand Justices ruled that the Executive Yuan had the right to overrule Taipei City's decision to delay the election and that the city government should take the dispute to the Administrative Court.