PUBLIC OPINION.

Patea Mail, 5 January 1882, Page 3

PUBLIC OPINION.

* Contributions, Letters, Inquiries and Answers thereto, are invited on Farming. Commerce, Politics, and matters of interest to the Patea district. Names of writers need not be Printed.

HARBOR BOARD BUNGLING. The Chairman of the Harbor Board has been for a time in a harbor Slough of Despond ; and because he has been dragged out against his will, he slashes out right and left. He tried his little game in an agony speech at the last meeting of the Board by (mis)informing members that the petition presented was worthless, as the signatures were obtained under false pretences. I asked you, sir, to publish the petition with the names attached, that those who signed might have an opportunity of proving Mr Coutts’s statement. But, alas 1 now that he has found no one will come forward to prove the false-pretence business, he retaliates by accusing the whole of the petitioners with selfish motives. He next accuses the ex-chairman of having a hand in the petition, as if petitioning were a great crime. Now, I think the right of petitioning is the keystone of our liberty. I may say that Mr Sherwood was ignorant of the existence of the petition until he was asked (almost the last) to sign. I asked him, as a favor, to obtain Mr Taplin s signature, which he did ; and Mr Coutts insinuates that he has done something dark and radically wrong. The late chairman, Mr Sherwood—than whom no one has done more for the advancement of the port—is continually subjected to the taunts and sneers, the jibes and insults of the present chairman ; charging him with the meanest offences. Well, the latest effusion in that line is accusing him of not disposing of the leases. No one ought to know better than the chairman that they could not have been sold before; and Mr Coutts is either misrepresenting the matter, or he is in the dense and blissful fog in which he usually is on nearly all other questions, and so cannot understand this. Yet he has repeatedly informed ns that harbor affairs are perfectly safe in his fatherly care ; instancing his own financial success. Well, the public have got to find that success in farm management is the correct qualification for a harbor chairman ; but I think he has proved himself a kind of ocular demonstration to the contrary. Never was the business of any Board carried on in such a loose and unsatisfactory manner. His own supporter stated something to that effect after last meeting.

But look what is being done at present in harbor improvement! Why, nothing but pure waste of our money. We find fault with New Plymouth for reckless expenditure, but I do not think that even they would be so dense as to do work which the railway authorities would be compelled to do for them in a month or so. I have failed to see anything in the engineer’s report to warrant the necessity and linrry of this work; and if the money were expended in lengthing the breakwater seaward, it would deepen the channel and stop the encroachment on private property. Stonewallin® Member. P.S.—I cannot conclude with a poem this time, as the opposition poet is not get-attable this morning.