Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors are urging the president to complete an earlier round of campaign promises before announcing a new lavish investment package for southern Taiwan.
“He [President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九)] has bounced his checks on every single one of his 2008 election promises in Tainan County [now Greater Tainan]. None have been completed,” Greater Tainan Councilor Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) told a press conference yesterday.
Holding up campaign fliers from Ma’s election bid in 2008, Lin pointed to broken promises on everything from removing highway tolls to building new regional expressways.
“Most of these promises had two to three year deadlines, but with only one year left before [the next] election, we haven’t even seen work begin on some of the projects,” Lin said, speaking in the wake of a new spending promise unveiled by Ma’s campaign.
The president announced on Sunday in Greater Kaohsiung he would invest NT$740 billion (US$25.6 billion) to accelerate development in southern parts of the country.
With southern Taiwan a pan-green stronghold, DPP lawmakers have been quick to label the promise as an election tactic designed to sway votes ahead of next year’s presidential election.
At the press conference yesterday, Greater Kaohsiung DPP Councilor Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成) said the president was “good at giving out checks, but was unconvincing in actually carrying them out.”
Construction projects, such as the completion of Expressway No. 84 between Greater Tainan’s Beimen (北門) and Yujing (玉井), and a new interchange in Yongkang District (永康) were supposed to have been finished last year or this year.
Instead, 17km remain unfinished along the expressway, the Directorate-General of Highways says, and construction has yet to start on the interchange, the National Freeway Bureau says.
Lin said that even simple projects, like phasing out two of four freeway toll stations in Sinshih (新市) and Baihe (白河), Greater Tainan, have not been carried out despite repeated pressure from local representatives.
Work has also been slow on efforts to create a NT$263.2 billion special trade area in Greater Kaohsiung that was originally expected to create up to 170,000 jobs and NT$769 billion in private investment, Kang said.
“No money was budgeted for the trade area at all in 2010. And this year, only NT$5.8 billion was budgeted, less than 2 percent of the total needed. It’s coming close to amounting to a bounced check ... something we are seeing more and more of,” she said.
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