DIFFICULT TO GET.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1215, 25 August 1911, Page 2

DIFFICULT TO GET.

LOCAL BODIES AND SUKVEYOKS. Local bodies, according to statemeints at the Counties' Conference yesterday, sometimes experience difficulties in securing the seryices of surveyors for couuty works. Tho Survey Department reqnires that road deviatioas, etc., shall bo carried out by authorised surveyors, but this, it appears, embarrasses in some ways the county councils—as tho following brief remarks of speakers at tho conference show. Out of sixty -replies which a county council in the South Island received to an ■ advertisement for a surveyor, only one was from an authorised surveyor. Tho delegates from this county said authorised surveyors were f<3 scares that it was almost impossible to secure tlieir services. Last year the county had had a contract for '■100 miles of reading. Consequent upon tho cutting up of thrco big estates. To satisfy tho Survey Department, a surveyor had to be secured in Duuediu, two hundred miles away. Another speaker said that authorised surveyors can, make at least .MOO .a year, and unless a local body was prepared to pay that sum in salary it was impossible to secure competent services. Unfortunately, a number of elderly men, otherwise qualified, were unable to comply with the njro limitations of tho Surveyors' InstiTlio chairman: "Unionism ?" (Laughter ) The speaker added that rtcro should h? forced to employ, men who were qualified by examination, but who wcro not autii'y'so.d" surveyors. ,/!?/ ne following motion waf enrrittl:— "That this conference is of opinion that Government should, bo <ulviK>:] of the fact that county councils are put to uuik\\\<«ary expense by havitip io employ anthovsurveyors' to undertake surveys to satisfv the Survey Department. That often*that counties have a.n officer qualified to do tho work (by examination) although not nn authorised surveyor, on<l that the Government be asked to grant relief accordingly."