Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and his main rival, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋), traded barbs over public safety, city governance and food safety in their first televised debate yesterday.
One of the sharpest exchanges concerned tougher penalties for drug-impaired driving. Chiang criticized Shen for not taking part in a legislative vote on a related amendment on Friday, accusing him of placing the interests of offenders ahead of victims and their families.
Chiang said Shen’s emphasis on his expertise in criminology showed “professional arrogance,” and questioned whether he understood the suffering of families affected by impaired driving.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Shen said that while he supported tougher penalties for drunk and drug-impaired driving, he considered the amendment disproportionate, adding that preventing such offenses was a more direct responsibility of local governments through police checks, drug-prevention education in schools and efforts to curb drug supplies.
Drawing attention to his previous work with the Association for Victims Support and recovering drug addicts, Shen said his efforts had been misrepresented.
“It now seems as though I’m being made out to be Taipei’s biggest drug dealer,” he said.
The candidates also clashed over city administration, including the accidental felling of a 40-year-old tree near Dongmen Market and the implementation of a free school-lunch program.
The two also criticized each other’s positions on child protection legislation and food safety, each accusing the other of applying double standards.
Shen questioned whether the city government had responded consistently to cases involving school food safety and alleged child abuse, while Chiang said the city government had taken action in the cases and introduced measures to improve oversight and protect children.
The two also clashed over urban renewal, with Chiang touting his record and Shen calling for greater support to overcome hurdles.
“A mayor’s job is to solve problems by addressing their root causes,” Chiang said, highlighting progress on urban renewal projects at Xinwei public housing, Nanjichang Night Market (南機場夜市), and Hulin Street since he became mayor in 2022.
During the past four years, Taipei has approved 2.4 times more urban renewal projects than before, and 1.3 times as many as the other five municipalities combined, he said.
Chiang pressed Shen on why projects in Datong (大同) and Neihu (內湖) districts had been difficult to advance in the legislature, asking him to identify the obstacles to urban renewal.
Shen did not directly address the two cases, saying that the number of approved projects actually moving forward to construction and completion was what mattered most, “rather than simply showcasing favorable statistics.”
The city government has made it easier to launch urban renewal projects, but issues such as property rights, review times, developers’ estimates and implementation can still hold up projects, Shen said.
About 70 percent of residential buildings in Taipei are more than 30 years old, so the city naturally has more urban renewal projects, but also more that have yet to be approved, he said.
The two-hour debate, held from noon to 2pm at the TVBS studio and cohosted by TVBS and SET News, was the only one that Chiang and Shen, the two frontrunners in a six-candidate field, had agreed to so far.
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