The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro, TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1922. GO FORWARD !

Southland Times, Issue 19522, 23 May 1922, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro, TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1922. GO FORWARD !

Yesterday the Southland Power Board clinched one question that has been exercising it for some time by adopting what is known as the “C” scheme for the Monowai hydro-electricity supply. This scheme will be more familiar to the public as the proposals of the Board’s engineer, Mr Thomas, for the construction of the lake control and generation plant at Monowai, and' it has been adopted in preference to the proposals of Messrs Hay and Viekerman, which provided for a larger output and necessarily for a heavier outlay. Mr Thomas’s plans aim at a smaller ultimate output and represent a substantial saving in the expenditure on the constructional work at the lake. Both schemes were approved by the Public Works Department, which, by the way, seems to have receded from ultimate minimum horse-power output stipulated when the original scheme was planned. In justice to the No. 2 scheme it should be stated that it was designed to satisfy requirements which are no longer being insisted on by the Department. The adoption of a scheme developing less than the maximum, which cannot be secured from the lake, does not touch the other vexed question, that of distribution. On that point the Power Board has received a check, because the Solicitor-General insists that there is no authority for the expenditure of loan money on the proposed canvass of the supply area, a canvass which would have settled the controversy as to whether or not the pessimistic figures presented by the chairman in his report on the prospective revenue were reliable. With an alacrity which will strike most people as strange, some of Mr Rodger’s critics have seized on this opinion of tho SolicitorGeneral as an excuse for the dropping of this examination, and have clutched at it with expressions suggestive of relief that the chairman’s figures and those of Mr Rodger on the question of actffal demand cannot be tested. As we have said before, we hold no special brief for one or other sets of figures. We have shown that the figures presented by Mr Hinchey cannot be accepted as final on this question and we have suggested that before the Board commits itself to the original or the mutilated scheme of distribution, it should be thoroughly satisfied that Mr Hinchey is

either right or wrong. We realise that the attitude of the majority of the Board has changed since these curtailment proposals were first brought forward and that now there is more talk of the mutilated scheme as an “instalment,” but the ratepayers are entitled to know, before the Board goes further, that the Board has done everything in its power to dispose of the feasibility of adhering to the undertakings given when the loan was adopted. We must confess to a feeling that Mr R. A. Anderson has touched the vital point in this question of the legality of spending money on the projected canvass. If the original schedule set aside £300,000 for trading it surely cannot be claimed that trading does not include the seeking of business. Mr Henry Fowler’s effort to avoid this issue by the suggestion that the canvassing has already been done, is weaker than we would have expected from him. He knows why this canvass has become necessary, and he knows that the first canvass was a long way from being complete. The Board is in duty bound to exhaust every possible effort to enable this canvass to be carried out, because it touches the Monowai scheme much deeper than any personal difference of opinion. This view of the matter was endorsed by the Board yesterday when it appointed a committee to “state a case” for the Solicitor-General, and without in any way deprecating the chairman's arts of persuasion, we say emphatically that the Board will have more chance of inducing the Solicitor-General to see the reasonableness of its claim that it can legally expend loan money on this canvass if the chairman goes supported by the committee’s recommendation than if he goes to Wellington without that document.