“We have restored Yilan’s pride because we are more cautious,” said Yilan County Commissioner Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢), who won back the county’s top office for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) four years ago, when explaining how he differs from the commissioner he defeated.
Having been a stronghold for the DPP and anti-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) activists since the 1980s, Yilan saw single-term former commissioner Lu Kuo-hua (呂國華) as its only KMT-affiliated county commissioner since 1981. Lu served from 2005 to 2009.
In an recent interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), Lin said that since his election in 2009, he had many achievements that the KMT was unable to accomplish, such as restoring the popular Yilan International Children’s Folklore and Folkgames Festival, which Lu suspended.
Lin said that in the past four years, he has insisted on pushing forward policies that he believes to be right despite encountering obstacles, such as banning chemical herbicides in farms and ending the use of unprocessed chicken manure as fertilizer.
Upon his inauguration, Lin said he discovered that the county government faced significant financial problems. The situation led him to make several urgent adjustments to rescue the county from needing financial “intensive care.”
“Another issue is that houses are rapidly increasing in rural Yilan,” Lin said, adding that the central government’s loosened regulations on farmhouse construction have led to a disaster in the county.
Yilan became the first county in the nation to regulate farmhouses and has cut down on the number of houses on farmland.
Lin said that he plans to run a campaign for the Nov. 29 elections built on policy platforms supporting green lifestyles and green industries, making environmental issues the focus of future policy actions.
Commenting on a recently approved straight-line railroad connecting Taipei and Yilan, Lin said “the Taipei-Yilan railroad line must also serve as a subway,” otherwise, railroad construction that costs NT$50 billion (US$1.6 billion) would not be too helpful if the only function is to save 18 minutes of travel time.
Regarding his KMT rival, Health Promotion Administration Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞), Lin said that “my only impression of her is that she is good at talking.”
“Chiou has criticized the high suicide rate in Yilan, but she forgets that suicide prevention is partly her agency’s responsibility,” Lin said, also chiding Chiou for not speaking out for Yilan when the county’s National Yang Ming University Hospital sought to be upgraded to a medical center.
Chiou also said that she is opposed to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, but she is not acting accordingly, Lin said, asking how residents of Yilan could expect her to defend and promote their rights and welfare.
“You could see whether a person would be willing to stand with the public and make sacrifices to shoulder the responsibility of service,” Lin said.
He said that when the nation was affected by SARS in 2003, then-director of the Taipei Department of Health Chiou inspected a quarantine center at a hospital in Taipei while wearing full protective gear, while other medical personnel had nothing at all to guard against infection.
“Now Chiou is running for Yilan county commissioner because the president [Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who is also KMT chairman] asked her to do so; I do not see her passion for the county,” Lin said.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS