The beleaguered Taipei Dome project was among the topics Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and Premier Lin Chuan (林全) discussed during a closed-door meeting at the Executive Yuan yesterday afternoon, a Taipei City Government official said.
The official, who asked to remain anonymous, said Ko is seeking a solution with the Cabinet to resolve the impasse facing the Dome’s construction, which has been suspended for one year.
Taipei deputy mayors Teng Chia-chi (鄧家基), Charles Lin (林欽榮) and Chen Ching-jun (陳景峻) and Taipei City Secretary-General Su Li-chung (蘇麗瓊) were among the city’s top officials who attended the meeting, the official said.
The official gave a tacit confirmation when asked whether Ko was poised to speak with Lin Chuan about possible solutions to the Dome at yesterday’s meeting, saying: “I prepared all the [Dome] documents for him [Ko].”
“I would not worry about the problems surrounding the Dome at all,” the official said, referencing the common experiences shared by Lin Chuan, Charles Lin and Minister-without-portfolio Chang Ching-sen (張景森) that they had all worked for the municipal government before assuming their current posts.
Lin Chuan was a former Taipei Department of Finance commissioner in charge of managing build-operate-transfer (BOT) contracts, while Chang was the former Taipei Department of Urban Development commissioner and Charles Lin the vice chief engineer.
The source said that if the Dome construction were to resume, the city would not make concessions on the safety standards it had set on the project, but did not say in what form the central government would support Ko.
On the sidelines of an event promoting Aboriginal cuisine yesterday, Ko, in response to media queries, said the purpose of the visit was to ask the central government to divest the land Taipei needs to build public housing.
This story has been corrected since it was first published to show that Lin Chuan was in charge of build-operate-transfer contracts as a former Taipei Department of Finance commissioner.
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