The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday nullified the environmental impact assessment of the controversial Beitou Gondola project, citing procedural flaws and the Taipei City Government’s review committee lacking authority.
In its verdict, the court said that the city’s environmental impact assessment review committee did not have substantial discussion on the capacity and structure of cable pylons to ensure that the project would not significantly affect the environment before conditionally approving construction in December 2012.
The court also said that as 80 percent of construction is taking place in Yangmingshan National Park, the case should be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Administration, rather than the city government.
The Taipei High Administrative Court’s ruling on Thursday upholds a ruling by the Taipei High Court in July last year in favor of local residents and environmental groups, who filed an administrative suit against the city government alleging that the review was illegal.
Local residents and environmentalists said the ruling was delayed justice and called on the city government not to appeal it.
Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association lawyer Hsieh Meng-yu (謝孟羽) said that the Taipei City Government reached a conclusion on the project before conducting the review, using the results to endorse the project.
The city government shielded the developer by conditionally passing the project in an opaque manner, despite the developer’s misinformation and inaccurate geological survey, Hsieh said.
The idea to develop a 4.7km gondola system that would run from Beitou Park to Yangmingshan National Park began more than 20 years ago under then-Taipei mayor Huang Ta-chou (黃大洲). The budget for the built-operate-transfer project was about NT$3.3 billion (US$99.53 million).
Local residents and activist groups have spoken out against the project over the years, citing the area’s fragile rock strata, questions over slope stability the numerous underground hot spring veins, severe corrosion caused by sulfuric fumes, environmental degradation and traffic issues.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in May said that the city government would not continue the gondola project or approve any large-scale development in the national park, adding that the city government was prepared to dissolve the contract with the developer, which would incur a NT$300 million default penalty.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: