A TERRIBLE STREET.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4217, 25 September 1874, Page 3

A TERRIBLE STREET.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—l -would like to know on what principle the Corporation expend the rates of the City. There are several mysteries connected with the management of municipal affairs, but this is the greatest. Rot being a reformer, X will merely call attention to that which immediately interests me. X reside in Martin Street—have done so for a number of years, and paid rates all the time. I have a large number of neighbors who have done the same. But I cannot recollect that the Corporation ever spent a single penny upon the street. I think I may go further, and say that they have never spent a penny upon it since the time it was laid, some nine years —rather a long time to be so shamefully neglected, especially when we remember how much money has been spent upon work of a merely decorative and uncalled-for character—how many new streets have been opened up, how many old ones made passable, where a very small amount of rates was derived. As a further piece of injustice, I may mention that it is understood that the Corporation intend to lay out .£2OO in forming a street through a piece of land recently purchased by the Wellington Land Building Investment Society—that is, practically, that the Corporation is willing to do that for a body of persons engaged in a speculation, and possessing’ no claim upon the rates of the City which it has for eight or nine years denied to a number of householders who have all that time been regularly contributing towards the maintenance of the ways of the City. Why, the Corporation could not show greater consideration if they were shareholders in this Building Society. If this is not playing at ducks and drakes with the ratepayers’ money, it is at least expending it in an exceedingly partial manner. Here is Martin Street in such a state of quagmire that the residents are almost obliged to resort to stilts ; so bad, in fact, that butchers, bakers, and others of the commissariat class can scarcely he induced to risk then' shafts, in getting in and out, for the sake of a little customIf I coxdd only obtain half-a-dozen lines of remonstrance from you, Mr. Editor, on this matter, I think some good would come of it.— I am, &c.. Ratepayer. Martin Street, Sept. 23.