The government yesterday shortened the number of years needed to prepare for zoning regulations from 16 years to between four to six years in a bid to step up the pace of land preservation in the wake of Typhoon Morakot.
At its weekly meeting, the Cabinet approved a draft national land planning act, which provides for a sustainable development fund that will collect money from developers, the government’s annual budget and utility suppliers, among others, to pay for preservation efforts.
In view of the nation’s dire fiscal circumstances, the Cabinet decided to scrap the mandatory fund scale of NT$100 billion (US$3.11 billion) in 10 years in its final version.
“We still wished to raise NT$100 billion for the fund … Although it looked that there was something missing without putting an exact figure on it in the draft act, we will keep it in mind and work hard to make it,” Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) told reporters.
Wu said making water and electricity suppliers contribute a certain percent of their income to the fund was not necessarily tantamount to hiking water and electricity prices.
“The legislature will deliberate on this,” Wu said.
Under the proposal, the Ministry of the Interior will have to draft a national land use plan within two years of the legislature passing the act, while counties and cities governments would finalize their regional land use plans within the following two years.
The draft states that land use can be broken down into four main categories: land conservation zones, agricultural development zones, urban-rural development zones and marine resources zones. Different regulations will apply to the sub-categories in each zone.
After the proclamations of the national and local levels land zoning, people who use lands inconsistently with the terms of the law have a two-year grace period to comply with the land use plan.
Violators will be subject to fines of up to NT$5 million or seven years in prison. Those whose unlawful land use results in a calamity could be fined up to NT$10 million.
The draft says that the national land use plan will supercede the Aboriginal Basic Law (原住民基本法), but it states that the government should respect the ways Aborigines use their lands and negotiate with Aborigines in the drawing up of land use policies.
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