Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) yesterday defended the city government’s decision to halt the opening of the tender for design proposals for a national pop music venue.
“After we publicized an on-line invitation to bidders, many experts specializing in pop music complained that we did not invite pop musicians or experts to evaluate their proposals. So we were wondering whether we should include specialists from pop music circles in the evaluation process,” Chen said.
The city government became the center of a controversy after Hsia Chu-joe (夏鑄九), a professor at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning and one of the original evaluators, on Wednesday accused the city government of ruining the impartiality of the international bidding process.
The city government on March 9 invited international construction companies and architects to submit their designs for the nation’s first pop music and oceanic cultural center, which is to be located at Kaohsiung Harbor. The project is expected to cost NT$5 billion (US$154.3 million).
The submission closed on Monday, while the tender opening was scheduled for Tuesday. The 10 judges were scheduled to evaluate the proposals on Wednesday and yesterday before choosing five potential winning bidders.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday that the city government had received 137 proposals from architects in countries including Britain, the US, Italy, Spain, Russia.
However, the city government raised eyebrows by adding five pop music professionals to its list of judges on Wednesday last week and announcing that it would halt the tender opening on Tuesday.
Hsia complained to reporters that he did not know the scheduled evaluation process was canceled until he arrived in Kaohsiung via the High Speed Rail on Wednesday morning.
Hsia said the city government had caused itself a great deal of trouble by canceling the scheduled bid opening and evaluation process because many international design teams had flown in to report their ideas.
Chen said yesterday that the city government was trying to make the bidding process “more transparent.”
Chen dismissed the impact of the sudden change, saying “the procedure will only be delayed by one month.”
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS