Street Widening and Betterment

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19812, 27 December 1929, Page 8

Street Widening and Betterment

We pointed out some time ago that problems relating to street widening and the application of the betterment principle were causing some concern to the City Council of Wellington, but the position in Wellington is only a little worse than it is in other cities whose thoroughfares are not so narrow. k According to Section 193 of the Municipal Corporations Act, if a Council widens any street or any part of the length of any street, and for that purpose takes or purchases or otherwise acquires land from one side only of the street, then the owners of land having frontage upon the opposite side of the street come under a liability to pay to the Council such sum as may represent the increased value thereby given or likely to be given to their land. An amendment to the Act however provides that a local authority must make its claim for betterment within twelve months of the completion of the work, and there was doubt until the other day about the eorreet interpretation of that amendment—whether it referred to the completion of the widening of a street, or to that particular length of a street actually widened by the setting back of the boundaries of individual properties. The point was tested in the Supreme Court at Auckland, and the Chief j Justice held that the amendment setting a time limit for the lodgment of claims for betterment applied to each individual piece of street widening. As it is very seldom that a street, or any considerable length of a street, is widened at a single operation, that judgment is important. As opportunity offer?, boundaries of individual properties are set back with or without compensation to the owners of the area of land taken, and it may be years before the process in any one street is completed; and until it i? completed the benefits of widening, if any, really do not accrue. There may, of course, be circumstances where a piece of widening confers an immediate, and assessable, benefit, and where a claim for betterment may properly be lodged within the present time limit of twelve months; but in most cases added value, if any, cannot be proved until a widening scheme is completed, and by that time the right to claim is lost. It was proposed to introduce an amendment into the House last session making the time limit more elastic, but (according to the Mayor of Wellington) the Minister for Internal Affairs, who had approved of the amendment, allowed it to be dropped. It is a matter that might very well be raised at the next Municipal Conference, since the law M it now stands is most unsatisfactory.