The method the government has adopted to review transportation system projects can withstand critical examination by the public, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said on Monday.
The procedures that the ministry is following have come under scrutiny after two transportation experts resigned from the review committee for a railway project in Taoyuan following their failure to stop the proposal being passed.
The budget for the railway project has soared from about NT$30 billion to NT$120 billion (US$983 million to US$3.933 billion).
One of the experts, Tamkang University professor Chang Sheng-hsiung (張勝雄), has vowed to launch a petition asking the ministry to establish a transparent and systematic mechanism to review transportation projects.
“We respect Dr Chang’s decision to launch a petition. Some of transportation experts neither attended review committee meetings nor understood how the meetings should proceed, but they claim that the ministry did not follow due process,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Deputy Minister Huang Yu-lin (黃玉霖) said on the sidelines of a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee in Taipei. “They should understand how the ministry strives to maintain administrative neutrality before jumping to conclusions. The meetings we have held and the procedures we have been following withstand legal scrutiny.”
The review committee proposed voting on certain motions and offered many constructive suggestions that were added to the minutes of the meeting, Huang said.
The committee approved all of its conclusions by reaching a consensus, with the wording being confirmed by each member, he said, adding that the ministry had strictly adhered to administrative procedures.
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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