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.”
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