The Daily Telegraph. FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3076, 6 May 1881, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph. FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1881.

We were sorry to observe the attitude assumed by Cr. Swan at the Council meeting on Wednesday with respect to the hill water extension scheme. We still more regretted the remark he made that the municipal engineer's time would have been better employed in looking after the drainage contracts than in preparing plans and estimates for an extended water supply. Cr. Swan is, apparently, a difficult man to please, and a hard task-imster. The engineer in preparing these plans, was simply fulfilling tbe instructions of the Council. Cr. Swan's hostility to any extension of the water supply evidently closes his judgment with respect to what is just to the ratepayers and due to a municipal officer. It may be taken for granted that Mr Lamb would not hare expended his time in a fancy scheme of his own ; that he would not have devoted an hour to the consideration of water extension if he bad not been ordered to do so. As a conscientious gentleman, receiving payment for bis services, he would as soon think of robbing the borough cash-box as of wasting time that he is paid for in designing chimerical schemes. Mr Lamb is about the last person from whom may be expected designs for perpetual motion, Napier harbor improvements, forest conservation, and irrigation works. This Bort of labor may in the opinion of some come under the ordinary work of a borough engineer, but as the ratepayers do not pay for those studies, Mr Lamb's appreciation of what is expected from him would prevent him from tnteriog upon such a seductive waste of his office hours. We therefore do not understand what Cr. Swan meant when he said that the engineer's time would have been better spent than in preparing plans for supplying the hills with water in looking after tbe drainage contracts. Mr Lamb has nothing to do with the drainage works; tbe last of the contracts was let before bis appointment to the office of engineer. The mischief had been completed, thanks to the assistance of Cr. Swan, and it is quite sufficient that the road overseer should occasionally give a glance at the manner in which the last few pounds out of between £20,000 and £30,000 are being thrown away. Of all the public works that have secured the hearty approval of Cr. Swan we do not know of one that has been of such a character as to be worth the money spent upon it. Follies, aggravated by blunders in their perpetration, waste, and extravagance, have been the characteris-

tics of our municipal public works ad- I ministration ever since the Corporation ! had money to throw away. If Cr. Swan had signalised himself in any endeavor to save public money from being spent foolishly ,• had he paid attention to other parts of the borough besides Has-tings-street, and the swamp, his opposition to an extension of tbe water supply might be thought to be due to mature reflection grounded on experience acquired as chairman of the pHblic works committee. The only construction that cau be placed on his remarks at the last meeting of the Council is that he has already made up his mind as to where public money shall be spent. He utterly ignores the pledges made to residents on the hills when they generously consented to the raising of a loan to be expended in what they thought would be a drainage and general improvement scheme. He forgets that without their consent, obtained as it was by the distinct understanding that the benefits of a water supply would be extended to them, no money could have been borrowed for the improvement of Hastings street. A sense of gratitude for the advantages that he and other councillors have derived from the spending of the loan in footpaths and curbing ought to suggest the propriety of permitting some of the money that may be left to be spent on the hills.