MAGISTRATE UPHELD.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 68, 17 February 1939, Page 4

MAGISTRATE UPHELD.

IN RESERVED JUDGMENT. An appeal on a point of law from the decision of Mr J. Miller, fe.M., delivered in Dannevirke on October 6, in the case of Harold Nugent Wilson, sawmiller, of Halcombe, and the Weber County Council, was dismissed by Mr Justice Ostler in a judgment now delivered. Wilson, stated the judgment, used three heavy motor-vehicles for transporting logs and sawn timber over certain roads in the county of Weber, and paid quarterly fees to the county. He caused damage to the Eskdale Road, which the county repaired and claimed the cost of the repairs from him. The Magistrate gave judgement for £SO, which Wilson paid. Under an agreemnt entered into between Wilson and the council, the former paid the council fid for every 100 superfet of timber carted by him over the Eskdale Road from December I, 1937, to August 31, 1938. The agreement made it clear that the payments were to ho in addition to the £SO already recovered for extraordinary damage done to tho road. Wilson paid the council £6B 10s Id in that period, and then claimed a refund of the heavy traffic license fees, or alternatively a refund of part of the fees. The claim was disputed by the council on the ground that the sub-clauses of the regulations under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1924, under which the claim was made, were ultra vires. The Magistrate upheld that contention. “I decide this case entirely on the ground that authority to impose heavy traffic licenses does not impliedly give power by Order-in-Council to provide either for the subsequent reduction or refund of such license fees, and no express power is given to make such a provision,” said the Judge. “That being so, in my opinion the Magistrate was right in holding that these two sub-clauses were ultra vires.”