The Nome Daily Nugget

CITY COUNCIL CONSIDERS INTERESTING MATTERS

With only one member, Ickstead, absent the city council last night had several important matters up for consideration.

One of the first matters of importance to come up was a request from the school board for about $1,338.55 with which to meet current bills. This amount was granted and the amount will be turned over.

Eight hundred dollars was reported as paid as taxes on the railroad and petitions were read from Thorulf Lehmann and the John J. Sesnon Company requesting a rebate on the taxes paid. These requests were based upon losses sustained during the storm and they caused considerable discussion before the council finally agreed upon a roll call being taken to grant them.

Perhaps the most important matter taken up was contained in the following letter from the chamber of commerce:

Whereas, the Nome Chamber of Commerce desires that the largest measure of home rule, consistent with law and good order, shall be secured to the inhabitants of our municipality:

And Whereas we view with dissatisfaction the recent activity of the United States district attorney in the matter of closing all places of business on Sunday: and

Whereas we recognize that the circumstances of necessity and mercy, which form exceptions to the Sunday closing statute are under the conditions and environment locally existing, including short summers and brief periods of navigation, so numerous and frequent, and so little appreciated by strangers, that they should and ought to be referred to the municipal authorities, to the officers elected by and responsible to our citizens, rather than to federal officials, who are now, and frequently have been strangers to us and to said conditions.

Resolved, therefore, that we petition and do hereby petition, the department of justice, to relegate, as in the Wilson administration, the enforcement of the Sunday closing law and other minor police regulations, to the municipal authorities of Nome, in all cases where the city ordinances are as broad in their scope as are the statutes on the same subject.

Whoever was responsible for the drawing of this resolution for the chamber of commerce it looked good to the members of the city council and after the members of the council had received the advice of the city attorney and Judge Lonner in regard to the legal aspects of the matter and the desirability of the council passed the above in the form of a motion and the city attorney was instructed to draw up an ordinance as broad in its scope as that on the statute books which referred to Sunday closing.

Reports from the city departments were heard and a few other small matters, financial and otherwise, were attended to.