Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has asked Taoyuan International Airport Corp (TIAC) to change the design for Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s planned Terminal 3 if that would attract contract bidders.
“I asked TIAC to review the design of the terminal, whether certain aspects of the design caused the budget to rise steadily and whether these aspects have made it difficult to attract bidders. If that is the case, the company should consider changing the design,” he said yesterday.
The budget for building the terminal was raised to NT$78.9 billion (US$2.54 billion) at the beginning of this year, Lin said, adding that he asked the company to quickly find bidders without having to increase the budget again.
Photo: screen grab from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s Web site
Last year, 46 million passengers passed through the airport, Lin said, adding that the number would grow at a faster rate.
Construction of Terminal 3 would not proceed if the design is not changed, TIAC chairman Wang Ming-de (王明德) said on Sunday.
Three calls for bids on the terminal project — twice last year and once in March — have failed to attract bidders.
The budget for Terminal 3 allocates NT$10.8 billion to mechanical engineering for the project and NT$34 billion to building the terminal.
TIAC said that it has proposed two solutions to ensure that the terminal is built by 2023: One solution would be to get a contractor to first build the north concourse so that the expanded tarmac area could be used to park aircraft; the second would be to simplify part of the design so that the cost and risk to the contractor is lowered.
The company would present its proposals at an information session on Thursday, it said.
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