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Ministry of the Interior agrees township governments should be abolished for good

The Ministry of the Interior yesterday agreed with heads of local governments that township governments and village representatives should be abolished from 2006, and that all local elections should be held on the same day from that year.

The move will result in a two-tiered system, with central government in the upper tier, and county and city governments in the lower tier. As recently as 1998 was a four-tiered system of government being reduced to a two-tiered system.

County commissioners and city mayors also agreed with the ministry yesterday that central government would have to hand over to them its current power to appoint senior local-government personnel.

In order to minimize clashes between central and local governments, Premier Yu Shyi-kun ordered the ministry to establish a Central and Local Government Liaison Conference at which the minister of the interior, county commissioners and city mayors will meet once every three months, immediately after taking office in February. Yesterday's agreements were reached at the first such meeting.

Township and village representatives are excluded from the meetings.

The conference is intended to serve as a vehicle for the integration of the opinions of local and central government.

At yesterday's meeting, the ministry submitted a draft amendment to the Law on Local Government Systems to abolish township governments and village representatives. Eighteen of the 23 local heads voted for the ministry to submit the amendment to the Executive Yuan.

The Executive Yuan has made abolishing township elections one of its top policy goals in order to remove one of Taiwan's three levels of government.

The change, when put into practice, would mean that the nation's townships will be administered by local government appointees.

Currently, the central government has the power to appoint top executives of local governments. In the future, except the police department and the government ethics department, the local commissioners and mayors would have the power to appointed all of their government's top executives.

Under the Law on Local Government Systems, Taiwan has held elections for township and village representatives for its 319 towns and villages every four years for the last five decades.

The Government Reform Committee, a consultative body to the president, issued a recommendation to President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in January that the local elections should be discontinued.

From the current quarrels between the Taipei City Government and the Executive Yuan over the city government's decision to postpone its borough-warden elections to the arguments over the allocation of the tax redistribution fund for the 25 local governments, central and local governments have fought furiously over power and resources since 1998, when Taiwan Provincial Government, which used to allocate funds to its subordinate levels of local government, was all but abolished.

"From power concentration [on the part of central government] to partnership between central and local government is a long way to travel. But ensuring local autonomy is part of the government's reform plans, and the central government will try its best to hand power over local affairs to local governments," the premier said in a speech before the meeting, which he did not attend.
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