TODAY SOME SNIPPETS on small items of cost and revenue, small relative to the growing size of our fiscal deficit but then inattention to small things can indicate inattention to bigger ones as well.
Those unnecessary and unsightly railings. In the scale of things this is clearly more of a cents than a dollars matter but it is indicative of inattention to cost control in a Water Supplies Department that, we are told, collects only a fraction of its costs from charges on water.
My thanks to solicitor Jonathan Midgley for pointing it out once again in a letter to the editor. I myself have recently seen one of my favourite catchwater trails in the Tai Tam Country Park ruined by unnecessary steel railings constructed on both sides of a narrow path, sometimes so close together that I have to walk sideways.
It is done for safety reasons, says the chief engineer of Water Supplies but can he please tell me why they are needed beside catchwaters only eight inches deep or along slopes where the bushes are so thick that you cannot fall through them unless you put a real effort into it?
I ask him also to provide evidence that the trails in their present state are unsafe when country park trails elsewhere are not deemed in any need of such safety measures, that the in-your-face slope numbering boards, which are sometimes posted at intervals of only a few metres, need be so big, so obtrusive or so numerous and that almost every bare piece of rock along the trails needs to be shotcreted.
As Mr Midgley puts it about that shotcreting: 'The reason why the slope work continues is because the budget which was set years ago has not recently been revised and with all government departments, as we know, they have to spend their budgets.'
Amen, and my suggestion to Financial Secretary Antony Leung Kam-chung is that he not raise water charges unless the Water Supplies Department demonstrates that it can restrain needless spending. These people must be told to cut their costs first, particularly when they use their money to despoil our priceless country parks.
