The nation has approximately 150 rarely used public facilities, Public Construction Commission Minister Wu Hong-mo (吳宏謀) said yesterday, adding that these facilities are to be used as part of the long-term care plan and as non-profit child care facilities.
The commission said it has a list of 109 rarely used facilities around the nation, which are commonly referred to as “mosquito buildings.” Based on a commission report, the government spent about NT$25.3 billion (US$801 million) building the facilities.
One of the facilities is Singda Fishing Port (興達港) in Kaohsiung, which cost about NT$7.09 billion.
The largest rarely used facility is an advanced research park in Nantou County’s Chunghsing New Village (中興新村), which used to house the defunct Taiwan Provincial Government.
Among the properties on the list, 34 percent were central government projects, while the other 66 percent were built by local governments.
Meanwhile, 19 of the 109 cases are market buildings, which topped all other categories.
Other less frequented facilities include primary schools, parking lots and incinerators.
Facing questions from lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, Wu said the commission has yet to officially list another 40 facilities with low usage rates.
Wu said the sites were added to the list over years of inspections and the commission is scheduled to brief the Executive Yuan on Thursday regarding revitalization projects.
The commission planned to create 14,000 jobs by putting the rarely used facilities to work, but it had barely created 1,400 jobs after it began managing the properties, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) said.
The commission is a “giant” when articulating plans, but a “dwarf” when it comes to executing them, Cheng added.
DPP Legislator Lee Kun-tse (李昆澤) said there are examples in other nations where the government has succeeded in finding ways to put rarely used facilities to good use. An example, Lee said, is in Vienna, Austria, where the government turned old gas storage tanks into shopping malls, office buildings and residential housing.
Taiwan’s rarely used facilities could be turned into social housing units and non-profit child care centers, Lee added.
Wu said the commission plans to use the facilities for child care and elderly care centers.
“Personally, I am in favor of turning these facilities into non-profit child care centers. Because of the nation’s low fertility rate, some primary schools have also become less frequently used. They could be used to provide care for the elderly to ease the government’s strained budget for the policy,” Wu said.
However, Wu said the commission has reservations about transforming the facilities into social housing units, which could have the negative effect of them being negatively labeled.
Wu also said that developers of any public infrastructure projects would be asked to provide plans on how they plan to manage the infrastructure after it is built.
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