Environmental activists yesterday cheered a court verdict that ordered the Pingtung County Government to revoke its approval of an environmental report on a Kenting National Park resort, which had been operating for years without being subject to environmental assessment.
Founded in 1999, Yoho Beach Resort is a 2 hectare facility with more than 400 rooms and is the largest hotel complex in the park. However, in 2013 media reports said that it was registered as a residential complex and operating as a hotel without a license and did not undergo an environmental review.
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) in 2013 ordered the resort to cease operations, marking the first government-ordered suspension of business due to the lack of environmental assessment.
The county government’s environmental impact assessment (EIA) committee conditionally approved the resort’s development plan months after the hotel’s operation was suspended, under the condition that it had to meet a zero liquid discharge requirement within three years. The approval was later revised to stipulate that the development did not have to undergo a second-phase EIA, according to which more stringent requirements apply.
Local residents filed a lawsuit against the county government and the Kaohsiung High Administrative Court on Tuesday ruled that the county government should revoke its approval of the resort.
The verdict said that the committee’s decision to exempt the resort from a second-phase review based on the company’s planned improvement measures, instead of current operating practices, was against the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (環境影響評估法), which stipulates that any development that would have a significant impact on the environment should undergo a second-round review.
The committee did not carefully evaluate the development’s environmental impact, ruling that the resort would have no significant impact based on the developer’s proposed pollution prevention and mitigation measures, the verdict said.
“The verdict was a landmark ruling against collusion between developers, government officials and academics,” Taiwan Environmental Protection Union Pingtung office director Hung Hui-hsiang (洪輝祥) said yesterday.
It was a big joke that the resort project could get an environmental approval when it is in a national park — a geologically sensitive area — and discharges a large amount of wastewater every day,” he said.
The population density of the sea cucumbers in waters near the resort diminished dramatically from 98 animals per square meter in 1996 to 0.02 animals per square meter in 2014, suggesting the severity of the hotel’s environmental impact, Hung said.
“There was not even one marine ecology expert in the 21-person EIA committee, and seven committee members were county government officials. The committee did not take into account the pollution the resort caused prior to 2013, but instead approved the resort project based on planned improvement measures,” Hung said.
“The review was a ‘coordinated murder’ of the environment by the government, big businesses and so-called environmental experts,” he said.
Hung called on the county government not to appeal the ruling and stop “tangoing” with the developer to avoid allowing the pollution to continue amid a protracted legal process.
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