Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) position on the Taipei Dome debacle has become aligned with that of his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) predecessors, Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), former Taipei Department of Urban Development commissioner Lin Jou-min (林洲民) said yesterday.
Lin, an architect, made the remark at a news conference in Taipei, where he joined New Power Party Legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) in announcing the launch of the Housing Right Reform Union.
Lin was commissioner under Ko from 2014 to last year. In May 2015, he ordered Taipei Dome contractor Farglory Land Development Co to halt construction due to public safety concerns.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Lin has often defended the Taipei City Government’s decision and insisted that Farglory must return to the Taipei Dome’s original design to ensure its safety before receiving approval from the Taipei Urban Design Review Committee to resume construction.
However, despite no computer simulations of emergency evacuation scenarios and numerous questions by Taipei city councilors left unanswered, the committee on Monday approved Farglory’s most recent design, only requiring it to make a few modifications.
Speculation on whether the decision was ordered by Ko has grown, as the mayor earlier that day told the Taipei City Council for the first time that the project could be completed during his term in office.
Lin on Monday evening criticized the committee’s decision as “pitiful and pathetic.”
Asked whether he believed that Ko ordered the department to let Farglory pass the review, Lin yesterday appeared to suggest that he believed the mayor did.
“What do you think? I have a good nose, eyes and reflexes, so my feeling should be the same as yours,” Lin said.
The design passed the review because two important parameters — “spectators’ unfamiliarity with the venue” and “panic during evacuation” — were removed from the simulation, he said.
The simulation was run without approximating the “worst-case scenario,” he added.
“The reality is that the first thing people do when they go see a ball game is buy popcorn, not look for the emergency exits,” Lin said, adding that people might panic during an emergency and look for their relatives, which would slow down an evacuation.
No other major venue could be approved without evacuation simulations considering those two factors, he said.
Asked if he thought Ko has changed, Lin said that the mayor’s attitude toward the project has certainly changed and is now aligned with that of Hau and Ma.
‘HUMILIATING’: Aletheia University students called on the school to apologize for limiting former professor Chang Liang-tse’s access to its Taiwan literature archive The Aletheia University Student Association yesterday called on the university to apologize to retired professor Chang Liang-tse (張良澤) after it prevented him from accessing the Taiwanese literature archive at its Tainan campus by changing the lock on the building. Last month, the university changed the lock on the building without warning, barring Chang’s access to the archive that he had “singlehandedly established,” Chung Yen-wei (鍾延威), the son of the late writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), wrote on Facebook on Friday. The university in 1997 created the first department of Taiwanese literature in the nation, and Chang, now 82, was the department’s first-ever chairman,
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
RSS