The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1929 £25,000 A- BEGGING

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 686, 11 June 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1929 £25,000 A- BEGGING

A LITTLE praise should be given the City Council for having decided at last to make an effort at drawing from the Government a subsidy of £ 25,000 for unemployment relief works. The money has been available for a month or so, and there still is enough miserable idleness in Auckland to call for assistance. It is true that, in order to obtain the subsidy, the council will have to spend an equal sum, but this condition, which is perfectly reasonable, should not be permitted any longer to deter the slow-moving administration from accepting the gift and getting on with essential relief works. Since the council has not a spare penny of free money to bless itself with, another municipal loan will be necessary. Unless the ratepayers have more churlishness than common sense in their present mood of discontent with local government affairs they will agree readily to the quick raising of £25,000 at a moderate cost so that a similar amount may be obtained without any charge at all. Perhaps it would he an abuse of the United Government’s generosity to ask it to lend the necessary money, but then no one should forget that the State Administration alone claims ability to borrow millions almost to an unlimited extent at an interest rate of 41 per cent. An announcement has been made by the Finance Committee of the City Council that the Mayor will go to Wellington this week and discuss the subject with the Prime Minister. It is not very plain why Mr. Baildon’s visit should be necessary, for Sir Joseph Ward repeatedly has explained that a subsidy of £25,000 on a £ for £ basis would be given out of hand for unemployment relief works as approved by the Public Works Department. Can the Prime Minister say or do more than that which he already has said and promised to do? He even assured the council thst it need not have any concern regarding the question of securing authority to raise its portion of £50,000 by way of loan. There appears to be some doubt in the minds of our municipal administrators as to the works which should be inaugurated and pressed forward for the relief of a thousand unemployed. It has been mentioned that continuation of the waterfront road might be suitable work for the specified purpose. Quite so, but it need not be looked upon as the only relief work. Many more new works could be undertaken with profit and advantage to the community. There is, for example, the wretched need of Victoria Street West for remedial attention. It is incomparably worse than the worst roads in the country. If its pot-holed surface were reinforced with concrete, the work would fill many unemployed hands. Then attention might be given to the obvious necessity for a new graded road from Fanshawe Street on the flat to Harbour Street on the cliff top at Ponsonby waterfront. Such a highway would be a boon to a large population on the Ponsonby slopes. For many years past more enterprising administrators than the city now possesses talked promisingly of beautifying the hideous corner at the reservoir adjoining Karangahape and Ponsonby Roads. It could easily and not too expensively be transformed into a beauty spot with a frontal rock garden similar to the improvement wrought on the cemetery reserve opposite the western entrance to Grafton Bridge. In addition could not something be done through an amicable and more generous arrangement between the Harbour Board and the City Council to begin the work of providing an ample recreation reserve at the head of Hobson Bay adjoining Shore Road? If the board would agree either to extend a lease of the 76 acres it offered to the council for a playground for the people, or, better still, make a gift of the area to the city, many men could be employed on building retaining walls as an essential preliminary to filling in an Unsightly tidal puddle. This sort of improvement as a practical exercise of vaunted town-planning would be a delightful beginning to the end of the horrible scheme for industrialising Hobson Bay. And a great or greater City Council also would give constructive thought to the advisability of utilising the waste land in the Ellerslie-Penrose district as a municipal golf course. There is ample scope in and about Auckland to spend gift money on unemployment relief works.