KAWHIA'S CRY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIV, Issue 136, 5 December 1907, Page 4

KAWHIA'S CRY.

WHERE ARE THE ROADS? Parliament may come and go, and subsidies may bo voted for chiming clocks for towns, and the King Country still asks for passable roads. Recent numbers of the Kawbia Settler have given long and sad reports about the hardships of the peopje who plead in vain for reasonable communication with the outside world. ! "I have been in this district six years, and I do aver Mr. Gregg's statement (most of which appeared in The Post) is the correct one, and if there is an enquiry some peculiar sidelights Will be thrown upon the methods of road construction pursued," writes Mr. Peter itoss to the Settler. "I can show a case hero of the Mangapohue-road, where it took about two months by three men to grade about three miles, and cost about £80, the road never being takon there at all, while a man standing :it a given point could sec both grades (being a cleaving), the one where ihe road has j been taken and the one where the waste- i ful expenditure was allowed to take place. This same road, the most important in the block (although Mr. Burd, District Engineer, has repeatedly denied it, even after every man in the district has signed a petition for its immediate construction), has crawled along at the rale of about a mile a year. At the end of this same road, construction work is being done in isolated patches, and in the whole two miles no provision has been made either by putting culverts in the fillings or in the small running stieamlets— of which the road fairly bristles. Consequently where the fillings have been put in the late rains have washed them all out, and they must be all replaced. Upon this same road can be seen a, small bridge or two which are speaking monuments to the man that engineered them, and a danger to either man or beast that crosses them. I know of cases where the Road Overseer has displayed more pertinacity than ability iii finding a grade, and after expending time and capital in grading the whole work has lo be redone by the man above him — and the Whakaplrau is not an isolated case by no means. We are still, with all the expenditure, all the oveiseeing, without what any engineer would call a road. And so we can assure Mr. Bnrd we sincerely, like himself, welcome an enquiry."