£80,000 LOAN PLAN

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 92, 12 January 1939, Page 10

£80,000 LOAN PLAN

Oamaru Hospital Additions LOCAL BODIES SURPRISED By Telegraph—Press Association. OAMARU, January IL A conference of the Oamoru Borough Council, the Waitaki County Council, and the Hampden Borough Council was held yesterday to discuss a proposal by the Waitaki Hospital Board to apply to the Loans Board for authority to borrow £BO,OOO for additions and improvements to the Oamaru Hospital. Statements prepared by the medical superintendent, Dr. Bevan Brown, and six members of the honorary medical staff were produced, and urged the necessity for improvements to the institution. the capacity of which, it was said, was overtaxed.

Exception was taken by the Mayor of Oamaru, Mr. K. Familton, and other speakers to the lack of publicity given to the need for hospital improvements by the hospital board, which had discussed the matter iu committee over a period of two years, and the consequence that the proposal to. borrow such a huge sum came as a surprise. Several items of expenditure were considered extravagant by some speakers and a motion was carried that the contributory local bodies would not assent to the scheme till plans and specifications were placed before them. The system under which a non-rating local body could saddle contributory local bodies with a huge expenditure without a poll of the ratepayers was condemned by several speakers.