The Manawatu Herald. Saturday, June 27, 1914. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1264, 27 June 1914, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Saturday, June 27, 1914. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The loan proposals submitted to a poll of the ratepayers ou Thursday last resulted in the rejection of water and drainage proposals and sanctioning the loan for gas works extension. Out of a roll number of 607 ratepayers only 286 took sufficient interest in these important matters to record their votes. One hundred and fourteen ratepayers cast their votes for the gravitation water and drainage proposal and one hundred and sixty opposed it, possibly on the grounds that it was beyond the means of the borough, and over three hundred, or more than half of those entitled to vote, abstained from exercising the franchise. A minority, therefore, decided the issues and the poll, so far as it serves to express true public feeling was abortive and a waste of public money. Ratepayers who deliberately refuse to exercise the privileges conferred upon them on such important matters deserve to be deprived of the rights of citizenship. Some of those who wanted water and drainage will accuse the Mayor and Council of apathy. The responsibility of the Mayor and Council, however, ceased when they submitted the data concerning the proposals to the voters. Thursday’s poll only goes to prove that an amendment is necessary in the Municipal Corporations Act to provide, where the population of any community exceeds one thousand, the law shall compel the local authority to instal water and drainage independent of a poll of the ratepayers in order that the public health may be conserved, and, further, that the State shall grant assistance where it is found the cost would impose too great a burden upon ratepayers and householders. This is the second occasion that the ratepayers have turned down water and drainage loan proposals, and it will be useless in the near future to again submit a loan to the ratepayers, unless some modified scheme can be devised or the public conscience aroused. Heaven forbid that the town should be visited by an epidemic of typhoid, for if that dread disease once got a footing here, under the present sanitary conditions, it would cause such a gap in our population as would make us bitterly repent our folly in rejecting the loan. As it is, diphtheria germs are plentiful in our midst, and we send more people to the district hospital suffering from infectious diseases than any other centre under the Board’s jurisdiction. We hope the Council will now redouble its efforts in compelling people to keep their premises in a more sanitary condition, by extending the powers of the nuisance inspector, to take immediate steps to deal with the Awahou drain and order the owners of a number of insanitary dwellings to make them fit for human habitation or pull them down. An inspection of every house tank, from which the domestic water supply is drawn, should periodically be made and the owners compelled to keep them clean. A thorough house to house inspection throughout the borough should be made by the inspector and a comprehensive report submitted by that officer to the Council. The Council, as the local health authority, must now be awakened to the fact that closer attention must be given to the cleanliness of the town in order to protect the inhabitants from outbreaks of infectious diseases.