CITY COUNCILLORS

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12609, 20 November 1926, Page 3

CITY COUNCILLORS

SHOULD THERE BE MORE? ARE COMMITTEES TOO LARGE? “TOO MUCH TALKEE” That the membership of the Wellington City Council should be increased in order to lighten the duties of the various committees is a view helJ by Councillor R. McKeen, M.P. He i 9 a member of the council a« well as a member of Parliament, ami the amount of work which falls upon his shoulders would hardly come foursquare with a 44-hour week. Wellington is very different from Melbourne, where some of the big departments are operated by separate boards and the trams by the Government. Wellington City Council controls trams, water, drainage, electric light and power, reserves, abattoirs, and there are committees for these and other things. 01 course the Fire Board had done awav with the Fire Brigade Committee, but there were still so many committees that every member of the council served on an average on about five oi them. They were given some preference except in the finance committee, which comprises the chairmen of the various committees. Often it is impossible for a councilloi to properly attend to his duties on ah the committees of which he is a member, and the result is that sometimes, when recommendations come before the council, the whole thing is threshed out again because certain members were rot present at the committee meeting. If there were more members on tho council the work on the committees could be more divided *up, and councillors would not need to serve on more than about three committees. Christchurch and Auckland had tramway boards, and some cities had drainage boards, these relieving the City Council of a lot of work. Wellington also had to administer a number of suburbs, while some of the Auckland suburbs were self-contained boroughs, yet Auckland City Council had a larger membership than Wellington. A lot of special meetings and visiting was done in Wellington, and these took up an enormous amount of time which pressed hardly on a man whoj had business or private affairs to at. tend to. The finance committee was comparable to a central executive, comprised of the chairmen of committees, but protests have been made by Labour members against this method of electing the finance committee whou these matters have been discussed by the new councils. They considered that the finance committee should be elected in the same democratic way at the others, by the councillors.

The city had grown beyond roven sion to the ward system, which wai parochial and created a lot of feeling, and instead of making progress wem the means of hindering various enterprises. So far as the Mayoral election was concerned the Labour Party believed that the chief citizen should be elected by the citizens themselves, and the election should not be made by the councillors. To do that would be abrogating the rights of the electors themselves. SMALLER COMMITTEES Another member of the council who would probably represent the views of other councillors said that he did not want to see the size of the council increased. It was big enough as it was, members sometimes talking till 2 o’clock in the morning. The results could be achieved by having smaller committees. Smaller quorums would be required and the work would bo done more expeditiously and with less talk, and the council meetings would* probably take less time also. Councillor D. G. Sullivan, M.P., of Christchurch, was aarprised to hear, that Wellington City Council meetings often lasted until 2 o’clock in the morning, and said that the Christ- ' church City Council usually got through its business in two or three hours, and councillors were usually home by 11 p.m.