The Ministry of the Interior yesterday rejected a proposal by the Taoyuan City Government to separate procedural approvals for different parts of the Taoyaun Aerotropolis project.
In response to a protest staged in front of the ministry by 30 local residents and campaigners, Department of Land Administration Senior Specialist Wang Cheng-chi (王成機) said that the ministry will wait for an environmental review of the project’s runway portion — known as its “yolk” — to be completed before considering land appropriation for the peripheral “egg white” development sections.
Only the “yolk” must undergo environmental review and the city last month called for uncoupling land appropriation approvals for the “yolk” and “egg white” portions, arguing that it would shorten approval time for the “egg white” portion by one-and-a-half years.
Wang also said that the ministry had required the city government and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to revise and resubmit their plans for the project to reflect the results of public hearings last year, adding that reviews of land appropriation would not begin until the revisions were submitted and approved.
Campaigners and residents had said that uncoupling land appropriation approval for different portions of the project would be unreasonable due to close links.
“The Ministry of Transportation and Communications chose to only construct the runway, but the Taoyuan City Government has always hoped that the two would be bound together. The reason that there will be demand for its proposed ‘egg white’ portion comprising housing and business districts is the extra passengers brought in by the ‘yolk’ runway construction,” Taoyuan Aerotropolis Anti-Eviction Alliance spokesman Tien Chi-feng (田奇?) said.
“[Taoyuan Mayor] Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) has sought to justify an uncoupling by saying that land appropriation for the ‘egg white’ and ‘yolk’ portions is procedurally separate, but there is a serious flaw in the city’s logic,” Environmental Jurists Association specialist Yang Pin-wen (楊品妏) said. “The portions have been unified in the previous steps and they stem from an identical project plan and zoning plan, why should they be unlinked now?”
National Chengchi University land economics professor Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮) said reviews of the project and zoning plans should also be reopened following last year’s public hearings, according to the spirit of amendments to the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例) passed in 2012 following a controversial appropriation case in Miaoli County’s Dapu Borough (大埔).
The amendments call for public hearings if there is controversy over appropriation from special agricultural zones, without specifying whether plans must be changed following the hearings.
“The Aerotropolis case is a landmark, because it is the first time that hearings have been held in accordance with the amendments,” he said. “Setting the right precedent is important, because otherwise all other cases will be thrown off.”
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:
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