Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday sparred with the city’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems regarding solutions to a dispute over land the Taipei City Government seized for the construction of the Xindian Depot, which could result in monetary compensation for the previous owners of the land.
The Council of Grand Justices on Friday issued a constitutional interpretation pronouncing the expropriations unconstitutional.
The city government in 1991 expropriated 239 plots to free up space needed for the depot — near the MRT’s Xiaobitan Station — to boost public transportation. In 2007, then-Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) allowed Radium Life Tech Co (日勝生) to build MeHAS, a sprawling housing complex, on the remaining space, prompting more than 100 previous landowners to file a suit, which they lost, against the city government.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
The Council of Grand Justices’ ruling means that the city will be required to compensate the previous landowners if the Supreme Court rules in their favor in a retrial.
When asked to comment on the potential compensation, which has been estimated at billions of New Taiwan dollars, Ko said that the sum is “too large” for him to make an immediate comment, and that the city government would wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling and conduct an internal review to work out plans in response to the issue.
Comparing the potential compensation with the disaster relief funds the city used after Typhoon Soudelor last month — NT$700 million (US$21.03 million) — Ko said that the sheer size of the compensation makes him “feeling weak in the knees.”
Asked about a remark by his predecessor, former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who called on the department to form a reasonable compensation plan, Ko said: “My goodness. This is too serious a matter. I cannot comment on it as yet. There is a lot of math to do before I can decide how to deal with it.”
However, the department in a statement rejected the Council of Grand Justices’ ruling, saying that the land seizure was completely legal and had followed due legal procedure.
The grand justices ruled that “adjacent land” connected to the depot had been expropriated in an unconstitutional manner, but there is no adjacent land, as all plots had been rezoned to land to be used for developing the MRT system prior to the expropriation, the department said.
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