The Construction and Planning Agency yesterday rejected a plan by Uni-President Group to build a theme park in Tainan due to the potential impact on the city’s water supplies.
The “Uni-President Dream World” project would have used 152 hectares in Yuching District (玉井) for a theme park and a 1,800-room hotel complex, but the Ministry of the Interior agency’s Regional Planning Committee rejected the company’s application because the site is in a rainwater catchment area for the Yufeng Dam (玉峰堰), which is a source of household drinking water for Tainan.
The site also sits on an active geologic fault, so it is a sensitive area with high potential for landslides, agency Planning Division Director Lin Ping-hsun (林秉勳) said.
The project, which was launched in 2009 after Uni-President failed to win approval to build a golf course in the area, would have been the largest development in a water-protection area.
Environmentalists who organized a protest ahead of yesterday’s committee meeting praised the decision, saying the agency was duly enforcing environmental laws.
They condemned the project for its potential environmental impact and what they said was unauthorized construction work that had already started.
“Uni-President nightmare, leave the conservation area,” demonstrators shouted during the protest.
Taiwan Environmental Protection Union Tainan branch director Chiu Ya-ting (邱雅婷) said large developments should not be allowed in drinking water protection areas, and the Dream World project was one of the worst examples of such developments.
Uni-President has a checkered past when it comes to the site.
The Tainan District Court in 2008 found Uni-Tung Lo Development Corp, a subsidiary of Uni-President Group and the developer of the Dream World project, guilty of lobbying politicians and government officials so it could conduct unlicensed construction in 1996 in a 21-hectare site in the name of water and soil conservation when it was still working on the golf course idea. The company official who was the defendant in the case was sentenced to a five-month prison term.
“The Dream World project is the product of collusion between the government and big business resulting in environmental damage, and to prevent unauthorized development, the government should reject the proposal and reveal the identities of those politicians who have lobbied for it,” Chiu said.
Showing aerial images of the Yufeng Dam area taken between 1988 and 2002, Tainan Water Conservation Union director-general Chiu Chun-hua (邱春華) said that the elevation of a 2-hectare area was reduced by 16m, suggesting that the developer had conducted more unlicensed grading work.
“How could local hydrology be maintained when a hill was evened out with illegal construction? We do not need more theme parks. What we need are water resources,” she said.
“Our next objective is to prevent the government lifting the designation of the Yufeng Dam area as a drinking water protection area, which would allow the Uni-President Group to develop the area at will,” she said.
The government plans to build a pipeline in the area to carry water from the dam to the Tainan Science Park, and such a move would make the area a source of industrial water and cost it its status as a water protection area, she said.
The Yufeng Dam site is upstream from the Zengwen River (曾文溪), which is Tainan’s main source of water, and the area must be protected, she said.
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
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:
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
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