MUNICIPAL MANAGEMENT.

Evening Star, Issue 19521, 31 March 1927, Page 3

MUNICIPAL MANAGEMENT.

*'o THE EDtTOB. Sir,—lf Mr De Spong’s statements are correct regarding municipal management your office should be inundated with letters from honest British citizens. There has been, and is, a frightful lot of mismanagement and waste of public money, as any casual observer may see for himself. These observers see, abuse councillors to each other, feel disgusted, but lack energy and sense of responsibility sufficient to reach the point of writing. I am one of them; but after reading Mr De Spong’s letter I feel ashamed of my reticence, I have many times within the last year waited for more than an hour in a certain recreation ground watching the so-called workmen do anything at all but work. At first I was amused, and tried to outdo them at the business of doing hothing. I failed every time. Then I became angry, thinking of the numbers of decent working men —willing workers, and with families depending on them—who were kept out of a job by those unscrupulous loafers. I could scarcely keep from telling them what I thought of vhem; but, after all,' it is the councillors who are to blame, for such a state of things could not bo possible if they did their duty by having some reliable inspectors who would go the rounds frequently and unexpectedly. These so-called workmen felt perfectly safe while loaning comfortably on the fence, smoking and watching somebody at play. When, after a long interval, they painfully dragged themselves half across the road, stopped for a gossip there, and then “dead inarched ” half a block to their destination, stopping sometimes at a tool house to have a cheering cup of tea. 1 have felt that there is a great deal to be said in favor of a band of suffragettes,'armed with hat pins, and have felt disgusted with the so-called management that made such practices possible—this in mid-morning, when they should bo fresh. It is almost criminal, and I should like to be on the jurywhen they and the councillors were tried for their idiotic waste of public funds.—l am, etc., Intelligent Management. ■March 31.