LICENSING COMMITTEE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 2, 7 March 1947, Page 5

LICENSING COMMITTEE

FORTHCOMING ELECTION DISTRICT NOMINEES On Tuesday next the local election for the Bay of Plenty Licensing Committee takes place. Booths in this district will be the Presbytex'ian Hall, Edgecumbe, Public Hall, Taneatua, and Courthouse, Whakatane. The election will be the first in many years as far as this district is concerned there being seven nominations to fill the personnel of a committee of five. The control of hotels throughout the Eastern Bay and Rotorua areas is vested in the Licensing Committee, which is an important body and meets regularly in order to consider police supervision, and to see that a decent standard of accommodation and behaviour is maintained on all licensed premises. Perhaps the public is little aware of the useful nature of the work which is accomplished. It is therefore worthy of mention that the two modern hotels of which Whakatane people are so proud, were more or less directly due to the insistence of the Committee on a better state of affairs in the town as far as hotels were concerned. i The nominees for election on Tuesday next are as under:— Coleman, Oswald Henry Guy, Edward Grace Jackson, Thomas Mason, Ernest Oswald Nicol, Andrew Pethybridge, Samuel Arthur Pile, Francis.

It will be noted that there are five nominees from the Rotorua area and only two covering both Whakatane and Opotiki. The weight of representation on the Committee is highly important, as the number of licensed hotels are practically equal, and it is essential that the representatives should be evenly spread over the whole district and not confined to a group from one town in the area. As constituted in the past, there have been three Rotorua representatives, one Whakatane, and one Opotiki. The number of hotels in the combined Whakatane and Opotiki districts is eight (including Te Teko, Taneatua and Te Kaha). There is a similar number in the Rotorua district and therefore it ill-becomes the public of this end to neglect the responsibility of voting on Tuesday in order to ensure that the town has a voice in the allimportant administration of the public hotels in the district.