CORRESPONDENCE. ROADS IN WAITOA.

Waikato Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1565, 15 July 1882, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE. ROADS IN WAITOA.

TO THIS KDITOTt. Sir — It is possible to guess the paternity of the local about the Waitoa Highway Board, in which the writer speaks inconsistently of the badness of the main road from Waikato to the Thames, and the peculiar excellence of the boaid, whose neglect is largely responsible for the state of the road, which certainly should be a county road ; but unfoitunately this board, impressed with the dignity ol its own importance, ignores the suggestion to hand over works which it has neither the cash nor apparently the capacity to manage to keep in repair. The chairman informs me that in summer the road is good, and that the settlers vho use the roads should do their carting then, a valuable opinion doubtless, but unfortunately settlers must use them when required, and it is not customary to send produce to market before it is grown, or before people who would use it will buy. It is not, however, want of money so much as a want of practical experience and thrift that has reduced the main road to such a disgraceful mess that the board has to subsidize you by advertisement that it is unsafe for traffic, that it puts costly tiles in the road to let water y flow or stand from one waterbole to another, and keeps men up to theii middle fishing for rushes or eels in the bogs at the side. Instead of in summer, when the ditches will be dry, widening and deepening them, and using the excellent material, coarse sand, to form the road, altogether insufficient ditches, or no ditches at all were made to carry off the water, while the stuff to form the road no better, if as good, was at great expense carted miles from great holes, which seems charactcrestic of road works in Waitoa. Nothing which prudent foresight might have suggested was done in summer, and now the rates are wasted as they have 1 epeatedly been by this continuous boaid, and settlers anxious to get their produce to market and supply Te Arolia, are told that they should have sent it in summer. Some years ago it is* said that one of the board's engineers v/as paid over £400 for- laying out roads and engineering culverts to give access temporarily to the abodes of members ot the board and their friend. It was also hinted that he got so much, for each corner and mile surveyed, and so much per ceutage on cost of works, which may account for much of the needless tortuousness of the Waitoa roads, and which with the before-mentioned wayside pits and holes entitle the ways of the board to be stigmatised as hole and corner. Many of those surveyed roads have now been abandoned, the Waitoa and Waihaukeke bridges removed, and the old road, which we could now have used, closed to please a member of the board, the Upper Piako bridge remaining, though on the wrong site, where it cost more t" place it than in a position where it would have been of 3ome use to the Upper Piako settlers. All these and many more instances could be adduced to - show how money has been wasted which but for needless^ cost for so-called engineering, officialism and advertisements, would have been ample to have made many useful works, and the main road either a road or a canal, instead of the present mongrel thing, which is neither. I may conclude by saying that I have had some experience in the South as chairman of road boards and otherwise, but have never there seen such selfish cliriu-ism-unthrift and pompous hair-splitting incapacity. I do not, however, blame all the members of the board ,* there have been, and are good men on it, but they cannot, perhaps, control the action of , Qthers which, like bad habits, are difficult ,%jjjgejjfttiines to get rid of. — I am, &c, %Z!mm* W. Arciid. Murray. =,^Annandale, ]2fch July.