The Taipei City Government yesterday announced reforms to expedite building permit reviews, promising to streamline approval for most private construction to enable more thorough reviews of large construction projects.
Taipei Deputy Mayor Charles Lin (林欽榮) said that delays caused by red tape cost construction firms as much as NT$15 billion (US$473 million) annually, with the average project taking two years to gain approval.
Since these costs are ultimately passed on to home buyers, renters and other users of buildings, it is important for the city to speed up the review process, he said.
Lin said that reviews for small construction projects would strive to avoid “worst-case scenarios” rather than aiming for perfection in site design, adding that relaxed reviews of small construction projects would enable more rigorous reviews of larger, more important ones.
He made his remarks at a forum attended by city officials and representatives of several architecture and real-estate associations.
Taipei Department of Urban Planning division head Lo Wen-ming (羅文明) said that past rules granted review committees substantial discretion over the final shape of most projects, leading to protracted negotiations with private firms before final approval was granted.
For most future projects, the city will simply require that construction firms leave an adequate amount of public open space at the project site, leaving the more aesthetic design details to the discretion of the building contractor, he said.
He estimated that about 80 percent of future projects would pass through the expedited process, compared with only 20 percent of projects in the past.
Lin also promised additional reforms to the review process to further expedite applications.
Future review committees will be required to immediately take up consideration of submitted materials, rather than holding a meeting every two weeks, he said, adding that committee members are to be required to send written opinions to the private firms ahead of a review meeting.
The expedited regulations would mean that the information that construction companies have to provide would be greatly reduced, enabling the city to post all documentation about the projects online without revealing firms’ business secrets, he said.
While smaller private construction projects will be expedited, the city promised more rigorous reviews for public construction projects, public urban renewal and large private projects with a total area exceeding 30,000m2.
Taipei is embroiled in controversy over several large construction projects contracted out to private firms under previous administrations, such as the Taipei Dome.
Lin said the city would require firms bidding for future public construction project to submit design plans based on detailed, tailored construction guidelines.
The new review process will apply to applications submitted after April 1, but will not affect previously approved cases, including the controversial Taipei Twin Towers (台北雙子星) project.
Lin also promised to introduce reforms to reduce overlaps in the bureaucracy involved in the review process.
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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