The Local Government Act (地方制度法) should be amended to ban city and county councilors from “recommending” budget allocations, civic groups said on Saturday, adding that most “recommended allocations” are used for pork-barrel projects and political patronage.
“‘Recommended allocations’ have already become an electoral tool to tie down voters using patronage — rather than serving a councilor’s real recommendations for local infrastructure,” Congress Watch Foundation chairman Yao Li-ming (姚立明) said.
While national and local legislative bodies are in theory only empowered to cut or freeze budgets drafted by their respective executive branches of government, there is a long history of local governments granting councilors special funds,” he said, adding that only Taipei has abolished the practice.
“This originally served as a way for local governments to buy off councilors,” he said, adding that with the exception of Kaohsiung, most local governments have ignored Directorate -General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics directives to publish figures on all “recommended allocations” for fear of sparking a backlash from local councilors.
“If you do not obey the central government’s directive, your budget will not be cut — but councilors can give you a hard time, so why create trouble?” he said, adding that amendments to the Local Government Act were necessary to force compliance.
Kaohsiung Civil Servant Citizen Watch president Chen Ming-pin (陳銘彬) said that while Kaohsiung had abolished individual councilor allocation “quotas” after publicizing fund usage, his groups investigation had found that more than 70 percent of funds continued to be used for questionable “non-urgent” projects.
Education appropriations made up the majority of funds allocated based on councilors recommendations, creating an allocation of school funding, he said, citing minimal guaranteed funding for individual school libraries, with most book-buying funds allocated based on councilor recommendations.
“It is really unreasonable, some principals are better at speaking with councilors, so they get more resources, while those who do not can end up with no subsidies at all,” he said.
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