Taipei City will establish a “civil participatory commission” to examine classification standards for city government documents, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
“In principle we are in favor of openness, with classification of documents being the exception, but we need to formulate standards for what will be classified,” Ko said. “Other than legal rules, there is also the issue of what level of information society actually needs.”
He added that the commission would also be charged with designing “participatory budgets,” small funds allocated to boroughs or communities whose use will be determined directly by local residents.
According to the city government’s secretariat, more than 61,000 city documents are classified to protect business secrets, personal information or the “public interest.” The classified documents make up roughly 0.7 percent of all city documents.
Ko promised to increase the city government’s openness and transparency during last year’s mayoral campaign, but has been subject to criticism by councilors over classification standards for city documents.
Meanwhile, Taipei City councilors Wang Wei-chung (王威中) and Kao Chia-yu (高嘉瑜) of the Democratic Progressive Party called for the city government to open up the negotiation records for MRT joint development projects.
The councilors said that an opaque negotiating process had created opportunities for collusion between officials and corporations, citing the corruption scandal over the MeHAS City development project next to Xiaobitan MRT Station.
According to charges filed by the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in 2013, former Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) officials face accusations of forging cost estimates used to apportion space within the development to inflate the contracting corporation’s share.
“The biggest problem with joint development projects is the profit allocation process, because land and building appraisal occurs in a ‘black box,’” Kao said. “City councilors have no way of peeking in, which gives officials the opportunity to act in a corrupt manner.”
The city has been allocated only slightly more than 30 percent of the space in several MRT joint development projects, despite it owning more than 90 percent of the land, she said, adding that profit allocation is ongoing for 20 projects.
In response, DORTS Joint Development Division official Hwang Kae-Lin (黃凱麟) said that the department had reviewed all of its joint development projects following the MeHAS City scandal.
The appraisal process has been refurbished to more than double the number of firms randomly assigned to appraise land and building values, he added.
He said that publicizing records about ongoing negotiations would put the city at a disadvantage by revealing its bargaining position.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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