“This will be a difficult and lopsided competition, as we are confronting a campaign team aided by administrative resources,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Yunlin County commissioner candidate Chang Li-shan (張麗善) said of her electoral contest against the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lee Chin-yung (李進勇).
However, Chang, the sister of former Yunlin county commissioner Chang Jung-wei (張榮味), said that if she shows her sincerity in envisioning a better future for the DPP-run county, she can win.
While Lee’s campaign theme is “Sunlight City,” Chang Li-shan is promoting a “Blue Ocean Yunlin,” or a smart county that is competitive, effective with “big service” and equipped with strong digital technology.
In a recent interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), she said she would turn Yunlin from a place that has been ranked at the bottom in terms of competitiveness and happiness to a safe place for enterprises, families and individuals.
The “big service” concept is about providing empathetic care to establish an administrative service team and a welfare system in which residents will not be helpless if they need assistance, she said.
Realizing the “smart city” idea involves boosting administrative efficiency and performance to nurture Yunlin’s competitiveness and construct a county with digital technology infrastructure underpinned by software and hardware that surpass that of other cities and counties in the nation, she said.
Achieving these goals will require tackling the county government’s fiscal problems head on, Chang Li-shan said.
Revising the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to ensure a fairer, more reasonable allocation of tax revenue is only one of several possible solutions, she said.
Local administrative efficacy and the development of agricultural economics have to be promoted, the county’s investment environment needs to be improved and job opportunities must be created to increase both Yunlin’s population and income levels, which in turn would improve the county government’s fiscal position, she said.
The KMT candidate’s first campaign commercial was about providing free lunches for elementary-school students. This idea was criticized by Lee’s team, which said that since it would be a welfare policy, its benefits would exclude the wealthy, as per regulations.
Chang Li-shan dismissed the criticism, saying that welfare policymaking has long steered away from excluding the rich to helping everyone in “need.” In addition, providing students with a free lunch is an educational policy to secure children’s equal right to education and should not exclude any group, including “the haves.”
Turning back to Yunlin’s finances, she said the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures has a mechanism to reward cities and counties that attract business investment, and she secured NT$500 million (US$16.5 million) to maintain Yunlin’s roads when she was a legislator.
The annual output of the Formosa Plastic Group’s naphtha cracker is valued as high as NT$2 trillion, so Yunlin County definitely deserves more than other cities and counties whose special budgets are allotted by the central government, she said.
She also called for greater transparency and the institutionalization of a feedback mechanism about the cracker for Yunlin residents.
The feedback mechanism would be institutionalized by conducting negotiations between central and local governments, enterprises and the people, and the transparency would be implemented by securing residents’ rights to supervise and review how the cracker uses public resources such as water, air and coastal resources, she said.
This is the second time that Chang Li-shan has run for Yunlin County commissioner. She campaigned for the December 2009 election, but pulled out of the race in late September.
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