The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 1930. A MUNICIPAL PRETENCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 885, 31 January 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 1930. A MUNICIPAL PRETENCE

EVERY citizen with ability to take a reasonable view of affairs vitally affecting the interests of the community will be ready to congratulate Mr. James Tyler, formerly the city’s assistant engineer, on his promotion by the administration last evening to full status with an initial increase of £6OO a year in salary. And no one, except churlish persons, will hesitate to give the new City Engineer the goodwill and support so essential to his success in a responsible and frequently a difficult position. After longdelay and much palaver, Mr. Tyler has got the job and it is right and proper that all the people whom he has served so conscientiously and well during the past thirteen years in a subordinate and an obviously inadequately-paid post should be willing to help him to do greater work on the practical side of civic expansion and attractive progress. If he be given open opportunity to promote municipal development in his own line without stupid interference by amateur engineers in the municipal parliament he should have no great difficulty in proving worthy of a distinctive and possibly a lucky preferment. In any case, this journal cordially wishes good times and marked success for the recipient of the council’s favour. The manner of the City Engineer’s appointment, however, provokes rather than invites less pleasant comment. Quite fairly, the method adopted by the administration must be described as a municipal pretence which deceived nobody except perhaps many of the competent and highly-qualified applicants for the position, who doubtless had believed or imagined that their applications would receive at least expert examination and genuinely serious consideration. It may be assumed as a certainty that none of them anticipated a decision on parish-pump principles and methods. Much more certain still, not even the least qualified engineers among the seventy-four applicants outside Auckland could have expected to suffer the unfair publicity given them and the additional unpardonable humiliation of being classified, by the leading municipal authority as “duds.” No doubt the use of that deprecatory term was unfortunate as well as reprehensible, but in view of its constant applicability by irate ratepayers to members of the council themselves, perhaps it was repeated inevitably and almost automatically. The so-called engineering “duds” need not accept their rejection on such preposterous grounds. Let them be comforted by the fact that their qualifications were at no time considered by expert judges. From the outset of the protracted method of appointing a City Engineer, it was clear that the position would fall, to the then assistant engineer. Within the gossiping circle of the administration the final decision was predicted in the beginning of the extravagant farce with the utmost confidence. Over a month ago it was stated in this column that a counting of heads long before bad revealed the prospect of Mr. Tyler being appointed by fifteen votes to seven. That early count was only a little erratic. The appointment was decided in Mr. Tyler’s favour by thirteen votes to eight, and finally confirmed by nineteen votes to two. If the difference be split the result demonstrates clearly that the council knew in November exactly what it would do this month or any time following on the exhaustion of a great pretence. It would have been far better for all concerned, and much more creditable to the administration, had the council, as a whole, appointed Mr. Tyler without any farcical competition at all, instead of maintaining for months an expensive and timewasting humbug. It is true that an antemic effort was made under stress of criticism to secure the advice of competent engineering authorities, but the manner in which such counsel was sought invited a refusal on the part of potential advisers. As Mr. F. W. Furkert, Engineer-in-Chief of the Public Works Department, explained in a letter to the City Council rejecting the invitation to advise it, “We do not think it right that we should be required to judge between six men selected by your sub-committee, when it is quite within the bounds of possibility that one of the sixty or more which have already been rejected, may be better than any of those in the limited list that you propose to submit to ns.” Quite so; the council had acted as an infallible authority before it called upon experts to prove that it knew nothing about the qualiof first-class engineers. Plainly, the council was halfhearted in its apparent desire to obtain guidance. The collective mind of the majority already had been made up, and everything else was and could be nothing more than a plausible pretence. It is to be hoped that the nonsense just concluded will be the last of such municipal farces.