COST OF CLEANLINESS SYDNEY'S BILL.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 73, 27 March 1914, Page 8

COST OF CLEANLINESS SYDNEY'S BILL.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, 21st March. ( Do you know that it costs the City Council over a hundred thousand pounds a year for the cleansing of Sydney? Well, that was the cost la3t year. Visitors from spick-and-span places in New Zealand may .-be excused if, after looking around for results, they, remark : "You don't seem to get your moneys worth." But it can be pointed out that on account of its peculiar geographical features, its heritage of old-fashioned methods of city buildings, and the nature of the vast amount of commercial traffic an immense amount of labour and money is required to keep the place even comparatively tidy. Whdt particularly alarms the City Fathers is the way in which the cleansing bill is mounting up. The cost of the operations was £38,600 in 1905, and has since then increased by over £61,000. If this rate of increase were kept up it would mean that the cost of tidying up Sydney would reach a quarter of a million annually in twenty years' time. But of course nobody expects that it will continue to so increase. The brains of aldermen and officials are now revolving hard in endeavours to devise schemes that will give at least present results for much less than the present staggering cost. A private firm has offered to do the whole of the cleansing work for fifty per cent, less than the present cost, and to do it efficiently at a decent profit to itself. There would seem to be a great deal in the repeated assertions of the new Lord Mayor that drastic changes on a wholesale scale_ are necessary in municipal administrative work in Sydney.