Providence Morning Star

MUNICIPAL EXPENDITURES. INVESTIGATION.

It is easy to raise the cry of "buncombe," and to accuse any friend of retrenchment of talking for effect, but the fact remains that even if the reformer be talking for effect he is pretty sure to select the topics which are likely to produce it. He takes something which lies very near the public conscience or the public sense of expediency, for he knows that it would be useless to raise a commotion on any less vital subject. It might make a noise for a few days but the interest would soon die out and leave the would-be agitator in a worse plight than before. But in the case of our enormous and still growing city expenditures, there is no ground for impugning the motives of the advocates of reform. They seek relief from these intolerable burdens because they know the people demand it. They hear what is the basis of the popular complaint. While wages are coming down, the city expenses go on as if nothing had happened; while property is shrinking in value, the amount of tax to be raised is not lessened, while the amount actually expended outruns the taxes, leaving the city in arrears for its actual running expenses. There is no business interest in the world which could be conducted on that basis, and every business man understands it. The way in which things are now managed indicates not only a continuance of high taxation, but foreshadows a time when taxation will become intolerable and the abandonment of estates to the tax-collectors be the rule rather than the exception. We have labored unceasingly for the past three years or more, to show just where this financial folly was taking the city of Providence, and now that the solid facts and figures so often cited in these columns are having an effect on the minds of the Aldermen and Council which they should have had long before, we hear the expected cry of "buncombe" and "cheap way of gaining notoriety." But neither Alderman Clark nor any other friend of economy in city affairs need be frightened at this. It simply shows that the attack is beginning to be felt and it ought to encourage them to keep vigorously on. The files of the STAR will furnish abundance of facts and figures, as they did to Alderman Clarke in his speech of Thursday evening. We have collected the vital points in city finances as they appeared in official channels, and sometimes we have extracted them from quarters where they were thought secure from our observation. The mass of them becomes public property and no member of the city government can be in want of full information when the columns upon columns of startling figures which we have printed and shall print lie open to him.

But there is one point which Aldermen Clark and Raynsford owe it to themselves and the public to investigate, and until they do this they will always be a little vulnerable on the point of sincerity. Mr. Clark shows the great increase in the expenditures of all the city departments with the enormous disproportion between an 80 per cent. increase of population and 873 per cent. increase of taxation, but he does not strike the head of the evil. The source of almost every part of this frightful extravagance is in the water department. It has stimulated these great outlays by precept and example. Seeing the reckless way in which hundreds of thousands have been squandered to meet the whims of the Board and their engineer, the other departments have been unavoidably affected and there is to-day a looseness of expenditure throughout the city which was never thought of until the water Board showed how easily the city of Providence would bear squeezing. These facts being admitted in their common talk by nine-tenths of the voters, why do not Messrs. Clark and Raynsford advance on the main line of attack? Why will they not at the next meeting of the Aldermen call for a detailed and intelligible statement of the cost of the Cornish engine at Pettaconsett and its housing? We repeat that there is not a man in the city government who can tell anything near what this elephant has cost or what it is going to. The expenses have run up to such a point that the water Board dares not make them openly public and its reports for a year past have been such as no average man of business could make anything out of. Here is one of the heaviest items in the whole list managed in this juggling way, suspicious to the last degree. Why don't the investigators take hold of it? The people who must pay the bills want daylight let in on them. It is well to look sharply after the cost of the schools, the police, the lamps, the highways, provided the needs of a growing city are not cramped by the process, but what is the use of trying to save $50,000 or even $100,000, if that course will simply encourage the Water Board to spend as much more in their "experiments" and sham engineering? Here is a matter for Messrs. Clark and Raynsford and their associates to think of and to act upon, if they wish to gain the full measure of public gratitude. Let us have an official statement of the cost of palace-building! The threatened reaction seems to have overtaken Mr. Blaine. He is again reported ill from extreme nervous exhaustion and malarial poisoning, and has been confined to his bed for two days. This malarial poisoning, it should be remembered, is attributed to the pipe-stem sewers, Washington being one of the cities where the system has been "carried to completion." The Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle has a realizing sense of the situation. Its issue of yesterday morning says: The Providence Journal, in speaking of a resolution which, it appears, has been agreed upon by the Water Committee of that city, in compliance with the request of the Pawtucket Town Council asking for a statement of terms upon which Pawtuxet water will be furnished this town, says: "It is understood that the Water Committee recommend naming the terms to Pawtucket that will be mutually advantageous, while they will leave our neighbors free to indulge in the luxury of a water debt any time they desire." We presume that when the two boards of the City Council ascertain "where the power comes from" for Providence to supply Pawtucket with water we shall know all about the "terms" which are to be proposed. One point comes up prominently whenever the subject of city economy is mentioned. To put it plainly and with that personality which the critical condition of the city finances calls for, it is this:--Where did Mr. J. Herbert Shedd gain that practical acquaintance with engine-building which justifies the expenditure of more than a million dollars to carry out his designs for the general success of which the makers of the parts expressly refuse to be held accountable? The new engine at the Hope Station, and the Cornish engine now in place at Pettaconsett are both built on this plan and presumably the other three to be put in at the latter place will be likewise. Planning single-minded such gigantic constructions implies a long and intimate practical acquaintance with every branch of mechanical engineering--such a life's experience as Mr. Corliss, or James P. Allaire, or Robert L. Thurston could show--and nothing less than this could justify the city in spending such a sum without a commission of engineers or some similar way of securing the best knowledge available. Has Mr. Shedd this experience or anything like it? Is he master at once of civil and mechanical engineering--the two most complex arts of modern civilization?