Amendments to the Urban Renewal Act (都市更新條例) passed yesterday allows authorities to tear down buildings to prevent holdouts from hampering projects, which lawmakers said would help speed up redevelopment plans.
Disputes between property owners in areas marked for redevelopment are to be resolved by municipal urban planning committees and urban design review committees, then hearings, in that order, the amendments say.
Urban planning committees are to prevent people from illegally zoning plots that do not belong to them into renewal projects, while the urban design review committees, staffed by land law experts, are to review the scope of any redevelopment plan.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
Should any property owner disagree with the project during these two stages, a hearing is to be held to identify the source of the dispute, which could be project participants illegally including other properties to which they have no right or holdouts demanding unreasonably large sums from the contractor for the demolition of their houses.
Should all three stages fail, property owners in favor of proceeding with redevelopment may ask local governments to demolish any properties in the designated area, the amended act says.
To ensure fairness, one amendment raised the quorum for a project to be initiated from one-tenth of all affected property owners to half of all proprietors before a renewal plan can be delivered to local authorities for approval.
However, if at least 90 percent of proprietors agree to a project, the plan may be waived through, the amendments say.
Meanwhile, lawmakers approved the fiscal 2019 budget for the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program after trimming it by 2 percent, or NT$4.55 billion (US$148 million), from the NT$227.5 billion proposed by the Executive Yuan.
Although unaffected by the cut, lawmakers froze 10 percent of the NT$1.8 billion earmarked for information security infrastructure at the national and local governments due to slow progress.
The NT$180 million can only be spent after the Executive Yuan delivers a report, a resolution passed by lawmakers said.
One-fifth of the NT$80.5 million originally budgeted for developing a “digital cultural and creative sector” was frozen in view of a proposed merger between Academia Historica and the National Archives Administration.
The Presidential Office in an earlier statement said that it is an outdated practice for a government to compile historical literature in the democratic era and the two agencies would be merged.
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
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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