Harbor Contracts.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 261, 16 February 1889, Page 3

Harbor Contracts.

[io the editor.j Sib, —It is a strange thing that whenever a local body has control of a large sum of money it gets beyond all consideration for those who have to eorape up year after year to swell the common fund or to provide interost on loans. As it has been rightly said the Harbor Board haa from the beginning made itself an obstacle of all local progress. First we have a most expensive Engineer and staff, then we have the most expensive machinery, and then we have imported labor, barely the ghost of a show being given to the laboring man who by his previous industry has chained himself to the soil of the place, and has now to pay through the nose for it. What I bare on my mind at present is a paragraph I notice in the Standard relating to the Harbor Board’s resolution to endeavour to get outside contractors to compete for the •applying of stone for the breakwater. Specifications are to be ready on the 18th, tenders to be in by 26th—which means, I suppose, that whatever advertising is done outside will be done by telegraphing at the expense of the Board, and if there are any colonial McE. and Co's they will have their negotiations tarried on at the expense of the ratepayers, though it may give local agents an opporlenity to advance the interests of their clients. Can you tell me, sir, what Is the object of trying to bring in outside labor, especially at •bort notice, for a job like that of sapplying •tone to the Harbor Board 7 We can always get plenty of people to spend a commercial summer with us, bat directly the dreary prospect of a cheerless winter comes round they will bo off to sunnier dimes. Why try and tempt such mon here when wo have so many ratepayers looking oat for work?— Tears, eta., . Gisborne.