The Dominion. MONDAY, JUNE 3, 1912. TRAMWAYS FINANCE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1456, 3 June 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, JUNE 3, 1912. TRAMWAYS FINANCE.

The financial position of the tramways, as disclosed at Friday's meeting of the City Council, is anything but satisfactory. For some years we have been contending that the system has not had a sound financial basis, a fact which is now abundantly clear, and which is due to the inability of successive Councils to shape a sound policy and stick to it. The official estimate for the year 1912-13 puts the total revenue fit £153,700 and the sum_ of working expenses, interest and sinking fund at £17,084 less than that. Out of this £17,084, the sum of £10,000 is earmarked for the renewal fund, leaving £7084 available to meet necessary works estimated to cost £27,269. There will therefore be a deficit of £20,000 on the year's working. Much of the credit for this disclosure of the drift of the system is due to Councillor M'Kenzie's valuable curiosity _ concerning the fate of the depreciation fund, which has been used, to the extent of over £80,000 in carrying out works that would otherwise have had to remain undone, or else been provided for by recourse to loans. The absence of sound principles revealed in this misuse of the depreciation fund was pretty conspicuous in the Council's discussion of the situation on Friday, and in the scrambling to devise some makeshift arrangement which leaves untouched and unsettled the broad problems of tramways finance, such as, what works are properly chargeable to capital and revenue respectively, and on what lines a depreciation fund should be expended. These are questions upon'which there will always be some difference of opinion, but it is manifestly essential to soundness that some definite policy should be agreed upon. The Council is still, however, unable to think of anything better than hand-to-mouth finance.

In the meantime it is a disturbing fact that the expenditure is growing out of all proportion to the revenue. No citizen who realises the importance of keeping this huge concern on safe lines will be satisfied either with the Mayor's complacent assurance that the trouble is due to commercial' depression, or with the attitude of that councillor who suggests that specific proofs of mismanagement must precede criticism. This is the traditional attitude of ignorance or insincerity in local or general politics anywhere, and we should be sorry to think that Councillor Fitzgerald has many supporters of his view. That something is radically wrong with the management, as it is obviously wrong with the financial policy followed all these years, is quite clear from the figures. As it affects the travelling public, the system is full of inconsistencies and injustices, as everyone knows, and there is urgent cause why the. Council should, as Councillor Cameron suggested, "go into the earning power of the various lines and pay for things out of profits." The public has not been told very much about the new Board of Management, and we do hot know whether it is still in the stage of investigation. Whether thp drift iB due to extravagance in management, to a money-losing time-table, to excessively long sections on some routes, or to a misapplication of the policy of concession-tickets, or to all of these in part, ought to be easy enough to find out. What is quite certain in any case, however, is that the system is not doing at all well

as a working concern, and is cvc,n unsupported by a sound and coherent financial policy. Any long continuance of this bad conjunction of a makeshift financial policy and indifferent management must'laud the city in trouble,