HALF-AND-HALF FOOTPATHS Is There Any Need For a City Council.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 106, 12 July 1902, Page 8

HALF-AND-HALF FOOTPATHS Is There Any Need For a City Council.

IF you have lived in Wellington long enough to fall over some of our absurd strips of footpath into the deluge of mud that in other towns is also footpath, you will probably agree with us that Wellington is in a woeful plight as to footwear. The Mayor reminded some irritating councillors 1 recently that there was a bye-law providing that if citizens wanted a whole footpath they would have to pay half the cost of fche portion along the frontage of their properties. Of course, it would not do to trifle with such a sacred thing as a borough bye-law, and, as to wiping the ridiculous thing out — never ' * • • Councillor Barber had the temerity to question the justice of that slab of municipal wisdom, and Councillor Winder believes that to force people to pay half the cost of asphalting the footpaths is unjust. It cannot be unjust, because it's a borough bye-law — a Medes and Persian kind of business, that altereth not. If you have a corner section, and there was a footpath running along each frontage, and you use only one of those sidewalks, that bye-law wants you, out of pure love and affection for your fellow-man, to save up your odd shillings to pay into the borough, so that everybody who likes may walk dry-shod at your expense. * • • This city frequently inflates its chest, and rather prides itself on its go-aheadness. The Mayor is the author of the celebrated "municipal perfection" ambition, and, in spite of all this, there is not a borough that we know of in New Zealand, Waihi excepted, that is so many decades behind the times in the matter of side-walks as Wellington. Putting aside that by-law, why should the owners of property pay half the cost of making the public footpaths' 2 Has not a borough council some duties, and is not one of them to levy and collect rates for such purposes ? * * * It is a glaring absurdity that any portion of a thickly-populated city should have half a footpath, allegedly asphalt, and the other half mud, and it is a more glaring absurdity that citizens should be asked to make a patchwork business, inereby adding a scrap here and a scrap there. Have you thought what the laying of a footpath means to, say, a working man at Berhampore, who has slaved hard, and is still slaving, to buy the house he lives in ? Why should he be compelled to slave a little harder for the City Council, in order to help them to carry out works that they should certainly perform without forced assistance? * * * The existing strips of footpath in most places are unworthy of the name, and if the very Russian system of cumpulsion is used this city will present a more piebald appearance than it does now. Patchwork is ever unsatisfactory, and putting new cloth in a worn-out garment is not economical. If the awful majesty of that absurd bye-law can be overcome without imperilling the country, it should be done, and if those councillors who cavil at the injustice to property-owners are earnest in their reform endeavours, Wellington footpaths will cease to be a reproach to the Empire City.