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eight thousand people. He recommended the division of the county into two—a northern county of 537,000 acres and a southern one of 1,000,000 acres and the abolition of the nine road boards. Coster and Wright agreed with the proposal; even Friedlander was prepared to accept it as the price of getting rid of the road boards. Harper was less ready to assent. In fact he was the only one who had protested against the earlier proposal for changing the constitution of the County Council because in his opinion the boards were already tottering. (Strangely enough he was later to champion the rights of his board against the loss of government grants to the council.) In spite of some strong backing, however, Holmes’s proposal came to nothing because although road boards objected to control from Ashburton, Wakanui and Rakaia were even less willing to be administered from Methven.

In the face of these demands for economy the County Council had gone ahead with the construction of a separate Ashburton traffic bridge which was opened in 1886 much to the gratification of those who used the main road. The nearest road boards—Wakanui and Longbeach—objected to bearing a share of the cost, as with other bridges, and apparently their protest succeeded. Later, John Holmes made Mount Hutt’s opinion of the bridge perfectly clear—‘he would not spend any time in dilating upon the enormity that was committed in the first instance by building the bridge [which was] a deliberate waste of public money. . . .”^[1] Against such opposition, and the even greater reluctance of the Geraldine County Council to pay its share of the cost of the Rangitata bridge the council constructed nine bridges before 1894. It was no light achievement.

The County Council considered the planting of trees before it made any decisions on water races. The third meeting—in December 1877—asked the government to vest in the council all plantation reserves in the county. The Lands Department was apparently about to sell most of these sections, but the council secured many if not all of them—they were still bare of trees. In November 1880 the council voted £1000 for planting and a committee—Coster, Jackson and Wright—decided that this grant should be used to plant 730 acres, as far as practicable in blocks of twenty acres. They calculated the area to be planted in each riding and nominated six reserves for the purpose in both the Upper Ashburton and Ashburton ridings and four in Mount Somers.

After 1880 plantations received nothing like the same attention