COUNTY MANAGEMENT.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 527, 1 June 1880, Page 2

COUNTY MANAGEMENT.

A new question is brought into prominence by the proposal to abolish local subsidies. If the Government desire to introduce a new principle into local selfgovernment, the principle of raising and spendingall the rates within each locality without looking to the State for grants-, in-aid, that will be a question much easier raised than settled. It will involve a readjustment of areas, a decentralisation of powers, and the creation of local governing bodies with larger powers than those doing the work. The change might possibly be beneficial, but that cannot be taken for granted merely because the effect has proved to be beneficial in the Old Country, The conditions differ. There is a clashing of duties and of jurisdictions between town boards, road boards, and county councils. Town boards hare limited and well-defined areas to govern. Road boards and county councils are competing bodies, doing the same work within the same area, and generally through the same men. It is a crude attempt to localise the general duties of a public body in a district dotted thinly with settlers. The actual result is expensive beyond reasonable necessity. There is a duplication of various salaried officers, and this in a district where concentration is necessary to economy. The work is not so efficiently done as it might ho under a system better organised and more closely compacted. Some plan should be devised by which road boards and county councils can amalgamate into one corporate body for cadi district. There might be local committees working in connection with a central council; and the central body could discuss and determine matters of policy, leaving the details of execution and of supervision to the local committees. The present duplication of official machinery in a newly settled country may be less absurd to those engaged in the work than it appears to outside critics ; but the absurdity is there. It is a folly that costs too much to keep up. Cannot the Government look to this part of the question of local self-government, now that they are seizing the subsidies ? RAILWAY POLICY.

An early increase of Railway charges is supposed to be foreshadowed in the Governor’s Speech, where he says: “ The public works which have already been constructed must be made more productive.” What public works can the Government have in view, unless they be Railways ? Possibly the purchase of certain district linos may have to be defended, and it is jnst conceivable that the defence may be put in this way : “ These branch lines were not paying, and conld not pay therefore the Government took them over in order to make them more productive. To increase the usefulness of a line is to make it more productive ; therefore we arc making the public works of the colony more productive.” This kind of argumentative defence ought to be too weak to stand the test of Parliamentary criticism. If the branch lines were not paying a fair dividend, it might be a desirable change to transfer their management to the Government; but the transfer should be defended on its real merits, and not on imaginary incidental advantages which may exist only in the imagination of the interested parties to the bargain. Those branchline transactions need scrutinising closely. It is time our public men rose above this wretched financial sleight-of-hand. -