Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) should work to stem an exodus of city government officials, or he risks bringing Taipei residents’ future down with his team, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Lee Hsin (李新) said yesterday.
Lee said during a city council question-and-answer session that as many as 14 tier-one and tier-two officials had left Ko’s administration since the mayor took office almost 18 months ago.
Lee then drew a parallel between Ko’s administration and the Titanic.
Referring to Ko’s wide popularity when he was elected, Lee said that both Ko and the Titanic had a “rosy” future lying ahead of them when they first set sail, but both became beleaguered after hitting an iceberg, with one of the “icebergs” on Ko’s course being the Taipei Dome debacle.
Quoting Ko, who in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) said that his much-maligned policy direction asking residents to pay more for using public infrastructure stemmed from his failure to realize that he should have “given to the residents before asking for repayment,” Lee said that the largest iceberg for Ko is Ko himself.
Lee also attributed the exodus in part to the leadership style of Taipei Deputy Mayor Charles Lin (林欽榮).
Lee said that he found out through talks with some of the city’s top officials that Lin has the habit of telling them to “get out” during a meeting when the officials’ opinions differed from his own.
Lee said that Lin, as one of Ko’s top aides, has assumed an attitude that is disrespectful to agency heads, which can hurt their pride.
“If I were to adopt your style, I should tell you to get out now,” he told Lin.
“I do not want to watch you embarrass yourself,” he told Ko. “You said that you wanted to transcend [the feuding between] pan-green and pan-blue political camps, but you cannot even transcend yourself,” Lee said.
Ko responded that he had always been quick to adapt and that he would “quickly correct his mistakes.
In other council news, Ko said that he would apologize to his predecessor, the KMT’s Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), over a mistake in the foreword he wrote for the translation of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist.
The issue was brought up by KMT Taipei City Councilor Tai Hsi-chin (戴錫欽), who said that Ko’s words had misrepresented Hau.
In the foreword Ko wrote that Hau planned to spend NT$40 billion (US$1.23 billion) on the Summer Universiade, which Taipei is to host next year, when Hau cut NT$1 billion from the budget for the sporting event before leaving office.
Ko said that he would contact the book’s publisher to correct the mistake.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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