ELECTRIC POWER PROPOSALS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 11938, 11 January 1901, Page 8

ELECTRIC POWER PROPOSALS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sm,—ln reply to " Citizen," whose letter appears in your issue of tho 9th inst., let me state that I (lid not write my letter of December 19 without accurate knowledge of the facts. The thing is beyond " the suggestion "or proposal stage. It is an absolute and undeniable fact that the engineer in question or his firm have been asked to prepare plans and specifications for the job, for the execution of which tliey are afterwards likely to be competing tenderers. Further, I know of another firm besides the one I referred to as having been " put olf and humbugged " who have been treated in a precisely similar way. Since the above was penned the City Council has met, and now, reading between the linc-s (a.3 I am in a position to do), the proceedings of last night's meeting, the council are still being jockcyed and engineered into a position from which they will have a difficulty in retreating in the event of the ratepayers giving them carte-blanehe. The shades of the Tramways Committee appear to me and others as being used as a scvecn for correspondence and information from other members of council and ratepayers that constitutionally they are entitled to know. But have the various members of the council or the Tramways Committee had laid before them all" the letters that- should have gone before them that- have been addressed to the mayor in his official capacity? It is the appearance of suppression of all of the information and correspondence that is doing harm to the proposals everyone is looking fonvard'to. I must again emphasise the point that I am as anxious as anyone that we should have electric power introduced into Dunedin, for without it we shall fall behind: but I am also desirous that the merits of all the schemes to obtain that power should be fairly and squarely adjudicated upon before a final, decision is made. Awaiting a straightforward and unequivocating reply from the powers that be, meanwhile—l am, etc., ' Jlili.ex Coughtret.