ONLY £41,000.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 237, 19 September 1934, Page 6

ONLY £41,000.

A correspondent, whose letter appears on another page to-day, asks us a few rather pertinent questions regarding proceedings at yesterday’s meeting of the Napier Harbour Board. We are not in a position just now to answer them fully because, following many vicious precedents already set by the present Board, the main proceedings were held in committee from which the press was excluded. Thus all we have to go by is a statement supplied by the chairman, while ii formation as to the discussion that took place upon it during the four hours the Board sat in committee is withheld from the public. One thing, however, is made pretty clear and that is that the Board, having now got the ratepayers entirely in its own hands, proposes spending some £61,000 on a project that was never put before them.

Of that £61,000 some £41,000 will represent extra expenditure, the other £20,000 being represented by an item that is being .discarded. Thus we have already an addition of about 10 per cent, to the £405,000 which the Board managed to get authority to spend on the Breakwater Harbour. Beyond that there would seem to be some additional dredging which was not previously contemplated and which is obviously going to mean a further substantial increase in the total cost. There is also some vague reference to the alteration of the alignment of the breakwater extension, the significance of which cannot as yet be quite understood. What the ratepayers have to note is that there are to be very important departures from the scheme on which they were asked to vote, and txiat these will involve a very material increase in the ultimate cost. What they may well ask themselves is why, although the plans were previously under discussion for many months, these expensive variations did not suggest themselves to the Board and its engineer until after the poll was successfully carried tlfrough.