Transparency in city and county councils has improved markedly over the past two years, civic groups said yesterday, citing widespread increases in the online availability of meeting minutes, with many localities also providing online video coverage.
“In the past two years, some of Taiwan’s local councils have seen substantial and swift progress,” Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) executive director Chen Chien-fu (陳建甫) said.
“Other than Yunlin County staying basically the same, almost every city and county has progressed,” CCW chief executive officer Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said.
While only Kaohsiung and Taipei were awarded “comparatively good” grades in the group’s 2014 survey, this year, Yilan, Tainan, Taitung, Taipei, Chiayi City and Kaohsiung all won high marks, with Keelung topping the rankings, he added.
The survey awarded points based largely on the availability of online information about council assemblies and committee meetings, including prior publication of agendas, direct online broadcasts and video archives, as well as official meeting minutes.
Analysis of content quality or cross-locality comparisons of overall councilor performance were not included.
Chang said that only Kaohsiung and Yilan County have local “council watch” groups, which perform detailed evaluations of the performance of councilors.
“Just publishing how often councilors questioned government officials was enough to get councilors flustered,” Taoyuan Local Union president Pan Chung-cheng (潘忠政) said, referring to question-and-answer sessions, which are a stable of local council meetings, providing councilors opportunities to raise and clarify issues with executive officials.
He said that the average rate of participation in question-and-answer sessions by Taoyuan councilors increased from 25 percent two years ago to 80 percent in the recently concluded session.
“Even though they dropped the original time limit from 10 minutes to 5 minutes and some councilors only take 2 minutes, the increase in rates still shows that they feel pressure from public scrutiny,” he said.
Yilan Citizen Council Watch president Lin Ching-sung (林清松) said the length of total session meeting minutes for Yilan County increased by 50 percent.
“Councilors got nervous after we published statistics on their meeting attendance,” he said.
“After we published figures, meeting times ended up being extended late into the evening, because all the councilors started registering to speak,” he said, dismissing arguments from some councilors that the business of providing “constituent services” should exempt them from being present throughout all session meetings.
Councilors receive special subsidies to hire assistants who can represent them to perform “constituent services,” Lin said, adding that councilors should be obligated to be present throughout meetings, because they receive extra pay for attendance.
Requiring constant attendance would improve efficiency, he said.
“Because councilors do not listen to each other’s speeches and during questioning, there is a lot of overlap in content, but that would change if everyone was on-site all the time,” he said.
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