Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) lashed out at the central government yesterday for failing to give her city a fair share of government construction funds.
Chen told a press conference that the central government planned to use NT$150.6 billion (US$4.3 billion) out of the Cabinet’s NT$500 billion budget request for infrastructure nationwide over the next four years.
Kaohsiung City Government officials had proposed municipal construction projects for this year totaling NT$24 billion to the Executive Yuan after the Lunar New Year holidays, Chen said.
However, the central government ended up allocating just NT$3 billion to Kaohsiung from its budget proposal for this year, Chen said.
The budget allocation leaves Kaohsiung at 18th place in terms of how much money cities and counties would receive, she said.
Taipei City’s budget was 4.3 times greater than Kaohsiung’s, while Taoyuan County will receive 2.9 times more than Kaohsiung, Chen said.
“There should be a fair and reasonable standard for distribution of the special budget,” she said.
“The amount of money given to Kaohsiung violated Section 2, Article 3 of the Special Act for Increasing Infrastructure Investment to Boost the Economy (振興經濟擴大公共工程建設特別條例), which states that the budget should be reasonably allocated to each city and county in accordance with their unemployment rates and the gap between northern and southern Taiwan,” she said.
Chen said Kaohsiung should be entitled to at least NT$10 billion of this year’s special budget in accordance with the size of the city’s population.
“Given the perennial imbalance between northern and southern Taiwan and the fact that Kaohsiung’s unemployment rate hit 4.7 percent at the end of last year, the central government should spend more money saving Kaohsiung City from its current plight,” she said.
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