Hearings on the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project should be opened up to allow all affected landowners and interested parties to participate, Taoyuan residents from the Alliance Against Aerotropolis Forced Evictions said yesterday.
About 10 campaigners protested outside the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, presenting to ministry officials a pile of petitions asking for permission to participate in official preparatory hearings on the first phase of the project, which are scheduled to begin on Saturday.
“There are still many interested parties who will be affected by the Aerotropolis and who will not have the opportunity to participate in Saturday’s hearings,” alliance spokesperson Wang Pao-hsuan (王寶萱) said, adding that owners of property to be expropriated under the project’s scheduled second phase had not been invited.
Photo: CNA
If implemented, the planned Aerotropolis project would add a third runway to the Taoyuan International Airport, while developing land near the airport through two separate phases of “zone expropriation,” under which the government uses public domain powers to redistribute land ownership within a zone to encourage development.
Wang said that second-phase landowners were interested parties because they were already included in government plans and would be forbidden from building on their land if the project is approved. Area home owners and lease-holders should also be invited, she said.
Environmental Jurists Association director Thomas Chan (詹順貴) said that planning for the project should “start from scratch” in light of a new Council of Grand Justice ruling on land expropriation.
A ruling last week on Taipei’s MeHAS City project (美河市) found that infrastructure needs could be used only to expropriate land strictly necessary for constructing infrastructure, not related development projects.
“Currently, this case is using the third runway [for the Taoyuan International Airport] as an excuse to plan the Aerotropolis,” he said. “This clearly a development project that includes all sorts of industrial and business parks, as well as residential districts — it is fundamentally about land speculation.”
He called for reconsideration of whether the runway was necessary and would serve the public interest.
Local landowner Hsu Tu (徐土) said he is concerned that government compensation for expropriated land would not match its market value and called for land-owners to be allowed to opt out of “zone expropriation” development plans.
In response, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) cited conclusions reached at the urban planning committee of the Ministry of the Interior on July 29 last year in which the land reserved for the second-phase development of the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project can only be expropriated if 60 percent of the land in the first-phase area has been used for commercial purposes.
The CAA said that it is still uncertain when the land expropriation plan for the first-phase area could be activated, and the ownership of the properties in the second-phase area might change as well. As such, it said it only notified owners of the lands located within the first-phase area.
Should the need to start expropriating land in the second-phase area arise, the CAA said it would see if the owners of the land at that time have different thoughts about the expropriation plan, adding that it would follow the lawful procedures to acquire the land.
According to CAA, 24 preparatory meetings are to be held spanning six weekends prior to the official administrative hearing for the farmland expropriation plan, with the first to begin this week.
The CAA also said that more than 20,000 land owners or relevant stakeholders would be invited to attend the preparatory meetings, which would be simultaneously held in four different locations within the first-phase area.
The CAA said that these meetings would be presided over by experts who are not affiliated with the CAA, who would examine all the controversial issues on the expropriation plan so that they can be discussed at the hearing.
MONITORED BY JETS: Chinese aircraft included Y-20 aerial refueling aircraft, suggesting that China refueled its short-range jets during flight The air force scrambled again yesterday to warn away 27 Chinese aircraft that entered its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), the Ministry of National Defense said, the latest increase in tensions across the sensitive Taiwan Strait. Taiwan has complained for a year or more of repeated missions by China’s air force near the nation, often in the southwestern part of its ADIZ, close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島). Over a four-day period beginning on Oct. 1, when China marked its national day, Taiwan said that nearly 150 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military aircraft entered its ADIZ, not territorial
DESTABILIZING: Beijing’s efforts to choke Taiwan, pressure its friends and hamper its democracy are a threat to the world, AIT Director Sandra Oudkirk said China’s provocative military activities near Taiwan are destabilizing and risk “miscalculation,” American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Sandra Oudkirk said yesterday, reiterating the US’ objection to any unilateral changes to the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait. Oudkirk made the remarks in a speech at the annual conference of the Association of International Relations in Taipei. “In the Indo-Pacific region, America’s effort to resolve and manage differences with the leadership of the People’s Republic of [PRC] faces distinct challenges,” she said, referencing a range of actions by China that she said run counter to the shared values and interests of the
EXTRADITION POSSIBLE? The suspect, who is quarantining upon arrival in Xiamen, is accused of killing a coffee trader on a street near his house in Sindian District The suspect in an execution-style murder of a businessman in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店) has fled to China and officials are negotiating his extradition, the New Taipei City Police Department said on Tuesday. The suspect, surnamed Huang (黃), took a flight from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at 2pm on that day to Xiamen, where he is staying in a quarantine hotel, as required by Chinese COVID-19 regulations, the department said. Investigators accuse Huang of shooting dead a local coffee trader surnamed He (何) on a street near his residence when he was returning from dropping off his daughter at her
BACK HOME: Lawmakers said the government should have known that the military reservist would be turned away from his United Airlines flight from Guam to Palau A military reservist vaccinated with Medigen’s COVID-19 vaccine, who was not allowed to board a United Airlines transit flight from Guam to Palau on Sunday, has returned to Taiwan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. After local media reported the incident on Tuesday, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, told a news briefing that day that the reservist might not have paid enough attention to the US territory’s quarantine regulations. At a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee yesterday, lawmakers asked Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials to clarify
RSS