Little progress has been made to fulfill an Executive Yuan promise to transfer responsibility for dealing with wasps and snakes away from local fire departments, New Power Party Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said yesterday at a news conference with a firefighter rights group.
Dealing with pests and other hazards has drawn firefighters away from their core duties, they said.
“The central government has not given local governments a very strong incentive,” Hsu said, accusing central government agencies of “slacking off” on the issue and only approving subsidies of up to 30 percent of local governments’ extra costs. “Many of the localities with the greatest number of cases are also in the tightest financial straits. The Council of Agriculture should not just take the position that it has done something and local governments are responsible for the rest.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Current council plans call for providing different levels of subsidies to local governments for up to three years, with seven of the nation’s 22 local governments eligible for the maximum 30 percent level of support.
They were proposed in January after the Executive Yuan intervened in a dispute with the National Fire Agency to force the council to assist in transferring responsibility from local fire departments to the council’s local agencies.
However, implementation has stalled, with 13 local governments having yet to make the transfer, Hsu said, blasting the Executive Yuan for failing to take a firmer stance on the issue and to approve the council’s initial NT$130 million (US$4.28 million) subsidy request.
Local governments have the authority to determine the allocation of duties among their agencies. The Legislative Yuan only possesses authority to cut appropriations, with Executive Yuan agencies responsible for drafting budget requests.
“Failure to approve the budget shows that all the talk of coordination and transfer has been empty talk,” National Association for Firefighters’ Rights vice president Yu Tzung-han (余宗翰) said, urging the central government to set a definite timeline for the transfer of responsibilities.
Even though only city mayors or county commissioners have the authority to directly change the scope of duties handled by firefighters, a stronger position on the part of the National Fire Agency would encourage them to make the shift, Yu said.
“Currently, our case figures are completely upside down,” he said, citing National Fire Agency figures that firefighters handled 85,099 snake and wasp cases last year versus 48,019 fire-related incidents.
“This seriously affects our safety, because we do not receive any training on how to handle wasps and snakes, making us vulnerable to injury,” he said.
“It would be acceptable for us to continue handling these duties during nighttime hours, as long as daytime cases are handled elsewhere,” he said, citing a Taoyuan program where the city government has transferred responsibility for dealing with daytime snake and wasp incidents to volunteer firefighters.
Wu Wu-tai (吳武泰), director of the National Fire Agency’s Disaster Rescue Division, said that all but three local governments have plans to transfer the responsibilities, with many waiting to receive funding before beginning implementation.
Forestry Bureau conservation division director Hsia Jung-sheng (夏榮生), whose bureau is responsible for the Council of Agriculture’s budget subsidy proposal, said the bureau only has the authority to provide “incentives” to local bodies to take up the duties, with local governments also free to decide when and how to provide the service.
She added that a new budget proposal for subsidies was sent to the Executive Yuan on June 5.
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:
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
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater