THE FOXTON PORT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1179, 2 December 1913, Page 3

THE FOXTON PORT.

“As was naturally to be expected,” says Saturday’s Feilding Star, “ the Foxton Herald has taken up our article on the advisability of opening the port of Foxton as an argument iu favour of giving the Foxton Harbour Board rating powers over the Feilding district. But that is rather stretching the point. The greatest objection to allowing an outside body such a right of interference with the rights of the local body here is that it would be extraordinary to grant such a power under the circumstances. The Wellington Harbour Board obtained the right some twelve years or so ago to include in its membership representatives from the Manawatu district, but it was exptessly stated during the passage of the measure that there was no intention of asking for rating powers. It would be just as reasonable to allow Foxton to rate Manawatu. So tar as the Foxton wharf is concerned, which the Herald refers to as the Government’s ‘iniquitous ’ claim, we have only to point out that we have strongly protested against the action of both the previous Government and the one iu power in demanding such a ridiculous sum for the transfer to the Harbour Board, because the Railway Department have been bleeding the importers for years and including the wharf tolls levied under the heading of “railway revenue.” We certainly thought Mr Herries would have taken advantage of the opportunity of handing the wharf over at a valuation, and we can only ascribe the fact that he did not to the malign influence of the departmental officials, especially when we remember the very low figure the Onehunga wharf was sold for to the local body. Indeed, we remember Mr Herries giving as the ground for the remarkable contrast that the Foxton wharf paid the Department and the Onehunga one did not. The reason, of course, being that because the people of this district were bled too freely by the Department, therefore they should pay more to get possession of their wharf. We say emphatically it would be a crying shame to pay the exhorbitant price asked for the wharf by the Government, and any proposal to rate the lands of the district to illegitimately swell the railway revenue should have the determined opposition of all right-thinking people.”