A fresh management team took over the controversial 228 Memorial Museum in Taipei yesterday as the city's chief of cultural affairs asked the public to give the group time to adjust to operating the first city-owned, privately-run museum.
"Today marks the beginning of a new chapter. We're supposed to be friends rather than enemies," Lung Ying-tai (
Speculation has surrounded the Taiwan Regional Development Institute (
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Public and media attention has focused on the institute's close connection with the KMT. The chairman of the institution, Mei Ko-wang (
Lung said that the past affiliations of a board member had nothing to do with which group won the bidding for the operations of the museum.
"It is not the committee's responsibility to vet the individual board members of the bidding groups because what we care about, and what we based our decision on, was whether the bidder was a legally-registered body and whether it had prior experience in running a museum," she said.
Lung also dismissed speculation that the final bidder had already been decided in advance.
"Nobody knew who would be tendering bids beforehand," she said. According to the law related to procurement, the committee which evaluates bids must have nine members.
Lung said that on the third day of bidding, however, there were only eight people available and one of those excused himself from the process when he discovered that he served on the consulting team of one of the bidders. The committee eventually reached a consensus favoring the institute with a vote of 6 to 1.
"It has been a fair and transparent process which will stand the test of any questioning and investigation," she said.
The first open bid on April 29 failed to attract any bidder, while the second bid on May 10 failed to reach a conclusion after neither of the two bidders were able to meet the required criteria.
Lung said the bureau has learned much from the city's first experiment of managing a city-owned, privately-run museum.
"We learned that it's a good idea to cooperate with and supervise the operator, rather than interfere, and to have the board of directors stay out of the operations," she said. "Moreover, we won't tolerate any abuse of funds or the imposition of a single ideology on the management."
Museum director Hung Min-lin (
"Mei has made it clear that he and the board of directors will stay out of the day-to-day management. What we'll strive to do is to adopt an objective and neutral stance, and to continue to run the museum as an educational, interactive, and historical facility," Hung said.
The museum was established in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of the 228 Incident, while President Chen Shui-bian (
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