The Chiayi City Government’s plan to demolish an old city hall and auction the site has drawn criticism due to the historical value of the building.
The city government said the old city hall is scheduled for demolition next month and it expects to auction the 1,360 ping (4,496m2) plot by the end of December.
The land sale is expected to add about NT$1 billion (US$31.8 million) to the government’s coffers.
Photo: Ting Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
The city government said it held five auctions for the plot since 2003, but was unable to attract bids.
To invite qualified tenders, the government has been demolishing illegal structures and banning unlicensed stalls around the old city hall.
However, local historians said that renovating the hall for public use would be more valuable than the proposed demolition and land sale, with some artists and literati calling on the government to convert the building into a museum.
Chiayi City Councilor Tsai Yung-chuan (蔡永泉) said the old city hall used to be the seat of the city council, the city office and a household registration office, which houses a collection of artifacts.
“The government should inventory those artifacts and keep at least a 20-ping space as a symbol of history rather than tearing down the whole structure and selling the plot in its entirety, which amounts to the erasure of history,” Tsai said.
Taoshan Salon founder Lin Jui-hsia (林瑞霞) said innovative construction and interior design could embed the remains of the old city hall into the new building.
Chiayi City Councilor Chang Jung-tsang (張榮藏) said that the government put forward a revised development project of the site in April last year, which has been mothballed in the city council due to last November’s nine-in-one elections.
After a city government reshuffle following the elections, the demolition of the old city hall was contracted without a resubmission of the development project to the council, which Chang said was a scheme to force the project through before it goes through due process.
Built in 1954, the building was the city office of then-Chiayi City — a county municipality — and later became the city hall when the city was upgraded to a provincial municipality in 1982, the city government said.
It said the building is featured in the film Where the Wind Settles (風中家族), which recreates the aura of a former age with the building’s vintage interior typical of government offices of the time.
The building has remained empty since the city government moved its headquarter to a now-demolished city hall in the city’s East District (東區) in 1998 and part of the old city hall site has been converted into a parking lot, the city government said.
It said that the proposed auction aims to boost land utilization and local business, adding that all artifacts with historical value would be preserved.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching