Environmental groups yesterday visited party caucuses and participated in a public hearing on the issue of the Cabinet’s proposal of a NT$60 billion (US$2.03 billion) six-year budget for flood control and prevention. They asked for legislators not to approve the huge budget hastily.
The budget proposal for executing the drafted special act of comprehensive watershed governance and development is set for legislative review tomorrow.
In front of the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday morning, Wu Li-hui (吳麗慧) of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union’s Changhua Office said: “The proposed budget is full of hidden problems. We don’t know how the government, under such financial strain, will come up with the NT$60 billion.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
“Flood control and prevention has a lot to do with engineering designs and construction plans, but we do not see them in the draft act for comprehensive watershed governance and development,” Wu said, adding that the draft only plans to allocate the budget to local farm irrigation associations, which specialize in “distributing irrigation water, not flood control.”
“The elections for the heads of the five special municipalities are coming next year and we suspect the budget is a scheme to win votes,” she said.
Taiwan Alliance for the Protection of Water Resources spokeswoman Chen Chiao-hua (陳椒華) said the group is skeptical about the new budget proposal because a budget of NT$170 million allocated for the management of Tsengwen, Nanhwa and Wushantou Reservoirs and stabilizing the water supply in the south was later found to have been used for development project analysis and planning in the reservoir watershed areas.
She said it is also concerned that the huge budget may be shifted to development projects in watershed areas, as they also suspect the recently promulgated National Regional Plan will loosen restrictions on development in drinking water source quality protection areas.
The groups urged the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to review the National Regional Plan through a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) process, and that the flood control budget not be used for urban planning or development projects.
Moreover, they said that articles loosening land use controls in the proposed draft act of comprehensive watershed governance and development should be removed, and that civic participation should be included in the plan.
At a public hearing in the afternoon, Water Resources Agency Deputy Director Wang Ruei-de (王瑞德) said: “The agency’s statistics showed that the size of flooding areas — flooding more than 50cm high in households — across the nation was about 1,150km2 in 2006.”
“After conducting flood control and prevention measures in the past eight years — which had funding of NT$80 billion and was later expanded to NT$116 billion, the improved areas amounted to about 538km2,” he said.
He said the agency suggested to the Cabinet that among the remaining more than 600km2 not yet improved, about 300km2 could be improved within the next six years, while some remaining areas are not suitable for flood control infrastructure.
Wang said the agency has reviewed the results of the flood control measures conducted in the past three years and already set certain goals for the coming years, so the biggest difference in the new proposal is that the land use needs to incorporate flood control plans for review in advance.
“Flood control in the past did not pay enough attention to land use,” he said, adding that the new plan hopes to cover flood control in land development projects.
The Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency said that although it is not required to do so by law, it would agree to submit a National Regional Plan for the EPA to conduct an SEA, if the groups are so concerned about it.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods