. . . “Where such expenses have been settled and apportioned by the surveyor of the local authority as payable by such owner, such apportionment shall be binding and conclusive on such owner, unless within three months from service of notice on him by the local authority or their surveyor of the amount settled by the surveyor to be due from such owner, he shall by written notice dispute the same” . . . (38 & 39 Vic. c. 55, s. 257)[152] and it must also be borne in mind that the person from whom these expenses may be recovered “is the owner of the premises at the time when the work was done, not the owner to whom notice requiring the work to be done may be given” (vide Fitzgerald’s Public Health Act, p. 301, 3rd edition); so that the town surveyor must be very careful to make sure that any of the property abutting on the street has not changed hands before he commences the work.
After the 150th section of the Public Health Act has been carried out and a private street has been thus put into thorough repair, the urban authority may take possession of it and declare it to be a highway repairable by the inhabitants at large; the following section of the Act gives the modus operandi necessary to effect this:
“When any street within any urban district, not being a highway repairable by the inhabitants at large, has been sewered, levelled, paved, flagged, metalled, channelled and made good and provided with proper means of lighting to the satisfaction of the urban authority, such authority may if they think fit, by notice in writing put up in any part of the street, declare the same to be a highway, and thereupon the same shall become a highway repairable by the inhabitants at large, and every such notice shall be entered among the proceedings of the urban authority.
“Provided that no such street shall become a highway so repairable if within one month after such notice has been put up, the proprietor or the majority in number of proprietors of such street, by notice in writing to the urban authority, object thereto, and in ascertaining such majority, joint proprietors shall be reckoned as one proprietor” (38 & 39 Vic. c. 55, s. 152).
The necessary notices in conformity with this section are usually prepared by the town clerk, so that the town surveyor has nothing to do with this proceeding except to maintain the street after it has been declared a highway repairable by the inhabitants at large, in the same manner as he does the rest of the public streets within his district.
There is still one other clause of the Public Health Act 1875, which deals with the question of private roads, and it is as follows:
“Any urban authority may agree with any person for the making of roads within their district for the public use through the lands and at the expense of such person, and may agree that such roads shall become and the same shall accordingly become on completion, highways maintainable and repairable by the inhabitants at large within their district; they may also with the consent of two-thirds of their number agree with such person to pay and may accordingly pay any portion of the expenses of making such roads” (38 & 39 Vic. c. 55, s. 146).
This clause is very explicit and requires no comment, it would however be much better for the urban authority in contemplating a case of this description to execute the necessary works themselves and agree with the person about the expense, for if they are intended to be afterwards taken over it is to be feared that the roads would be very improperly constructed in the first place by the person intending to hand them over. It must be noted that the word “roads” is used in the above clause instead of “streets” as in the other clauses I have quoted, and also that the word “maintainable” is added to repairable.
Street is the term legally used in the Public Health Act 1875, and is thus defined:
“Street includes any highway (not being a turnpike road) and any public bridge (not being a county bridge), and any road, lane, footway, square, court, alley or passage, whether a thoroughfare or not” (38 & 39 Vic. c. 55, s. 4.) so that whereas in the 150th section of the Public Health Act 1875, any of the above can be dealt with, it is only open for the urban authority to deal with roads under the 146th section of the Act, and it is sometimes rather difficult to define a road for the purposes of the latter section.