The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, February 23, 1911. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 958, 23 February 1911, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, February 23, 1911. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Thk Feilding Star, with characteristic and commendable enterprise, is endeavouring to stir up Feilding’s interest in matters connected with our local port and the extension of the tramway, via Rongotea and Awahuri to Feilding. It has interviewed several of Feilding’s business men on the subjects above mentioned, adding particular emphasis, however, on the suggested Harbour Board rating area. We publish the Star’s interviews and comments elsewhere in this issue. With regard to tramway extension that is a matter which no doubt will receive consideration after the Manawatu County Council has made the connection, so long agitated for, with the main railway line at Greatford or Mart on. With respect to the suggested Harbour Board rating area, our contemporary is either not conversant with or has forgotten the details connected with the formation of the Board and simply speculates as to what may take place in the dim and distant future if the Board is possessed of a rating area. The Star places before its readers the worst possible aspect of what might be done by a reckless and ambitious Board. We would remind the Star in the first place that it was not the intention of the founders of the Board to create a rating area, as sufficient revenue was, and is, obtainable from wharfage dues to keep the port open for regular coastal traffic. This revenue, which is earned by the port, instead of coming into the coffers of the Board, goes to swell the earnings of the working railways. Had the Government handed over the wharf to the Board when constituted, the question of a rating area would not have cropped up at all. The Minister of Railways cannot see that in handing over the control of the wharf to the Board he is but transferring its administration from one public institution to another. His only view point is that the working railways will be deprived of certain revenue which it has never earned, and that if the wharf and its revenues are to be acquired by the Board then the

Board must purchase them at a price, and he further stipulates that the revenue must not be pledged as security for the loan, but that the Board must pledge a rating area as security. It will be seen, therefore, that unless the Board is prepared to accept the Minister’s terms it has a very poor chance of coming into its rights. We understand that the present revenue would be sufficient to meet interest and sinking fund on a loan .to acquire the wharf, therefore making it unnecessary to call up a rate, so that Feildiug would have little to fear in this connection. If, however, wild cat schemes to cost dundreds of thousands of pounds were even thought of —which they are not — then there would be some reason not only for Feilding’s opposition to a rating area, but for every other local body in the suggested area to strenuously oppose it.