By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers representing “non-special municipality” cities and counties yesterday said they would propose a 10-year, NT$100 billion (US$3.33 billion) project to help local governments’ finances and to close the gap in general development between the six special municipalities and local regions.
The six special municipalities — Taipei City, New Taipei City, Greater Taichung, Greater Tainan, Greater Kaohsiung and Taoyuan County, which is scheduled to be promoted to special municipality status by the end of the year — take up only 30 percent of the nation’s territory, but have created a magnet effect by accounting for more than 70 percent of the population and sucking up most government funding, Pingtung County DPP Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安) told a press conference.
“One Taiwan, two worlds. That is how I would put it. The urbanization phenomenon and the government’s poor allocation of the Tax Redistribution Fund (統籌分配款), which heavily favored the special municipalities, have contributed to a growing imbalance between the six large cities and the other administrative zones,” Pan said.
Between 2011 and this year, about 63 percent of the tax redistribution fund went to the six special municipalities, while only 22 percent was allocated to the 16 other administrative zones, Pan said.
Drawing on the Offshore Islands Development Act (離島建設條例) and the Hualien-Taitung Area Development Act (花東地區發展條例), Pan and other DPP lawmakers are proposing a special act for revitalizing cities’ and counties’ development, under which a development fund of NT$100 billion is planned to be established to help poorer and less-developed regions.
Pan said he hoped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers representing those regions would support the proposed bill for the 11 administrative regions.
According to Pan — the DPP’s nominee in the Pingtung commissioner election — the bill would demand that the government initiate a strategic plan, to be reviewed every four years, and that the development fund would come from an annual government subsidy to be granted for a period of 10 years, together with interest, donations and other resources.
Citing government statistics, the lawmakers said that the gap between the special municipalities and other regions is alarming.
In 2012, the average annual household income in the special municipalities was NT$160,000 higher than in other regions, while the average social welfare expenditure per resident was NT$8,529 for special municipality residents and NT$5,087 for non-special municipality residents.
As far as transportation infrastructure is concerned, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ annual subsidy for the special municipalities in the five years between 2009 and last year was as high as NT$28 billion, but the highest annual subsidy in the non-special municipality regions was NT$5.6 billion.
In other areas, such as medical service resources, long-term care resources and education resources, the imbalance has also been apparent, DPP Legislator Wu Yi-chen (吳宜臻) of Miaoli County said.
“It doesn’t make sense that the larger cities with much more tax sources receive more government subsidies. It should have been the other way around,” Wu said.
If the imbalance was not addressed quickly, the persistent population outflow and worsening local government finances in the lesser-developed regions could further deteriorate, DPP Legislator Chen Ou-po (陳歐珀) of Yilan County said.