WHATAWHATA.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 2395, 15 November 1887, Page 2

WHATAWHATA.

County v. Hoad Hoard. —Your leader of November Ist will find an answering echo in the breast of many a ratepayer, and perhaps nowhere will this feeling he more general tluui in our own district. It is not too much to say that the road board system —so far as the Newcastle district is concerned —has proved a conspicuous failure. I am not alluding to any particular time or administration, but simply taking a retrospective glance over the past fourteen years; and to any impartial person, the thought of the vast sums that have been collected as rates, subsidies, and special grants, and spent, nr rather mis-spont, on jobs and logrolling of every description, and the wretched results that can only be pointed to as the return of all this outlay, is saddening in the extreme. There are some doubtless who are still wedded to the old road board ; to those I would say, ride round the district and sop the many useless works over which good money has been wasted; swamp roads, bridges, culverts and clay roads, some abandoned before completion ; others found to bo in the wrong place; and others, again, never required at all. This would convince the most sceptical that there is something wrong in a system which has permitted all this, and no one who is a well-wisher of the district could desire otherwise than that some change should bo made in our form of local government. The County Council has boon unpopular with us, owing to its neglect of many useful and needed works ; but there is a reason for tin's, and which deserves more than passing notice; this, is the heavy and oft recurring expenditure upon the swamp road to Hamilton, While this is regarded, and properly so, as the ipost important work in the district its cost has heeu a heavy dpajii Ulj the funds allotted to us, and it seems scarcely fair that the maintenance of this road, which is used ns much by the ratepayers in the Raglan County as by those in Waipa should be borne by one riding. This is not fair or just, and its effect in Newcastle has been to rob other parts of the district so that this main artery may ho kept open Were if; not for thjs the county system would he nifigc populay than' it is i but in any case atfd with all its defects 'place it alongside upr road tyiards and 'jb pomes nut far and away the Host, both’ as to justice, cheapness in administration, and quality of its works.