The Oakwood Press (Oakwood

What a mighty roar of protest would go up from the people if the city of Dayton were to employ two special police officers: One to back up to a convenient trash can at Third and Main streets and, while appearing to be concentrating on ways and means of catching the holdup men and thugs who infest the city, drop, one after the other, 15,000 traffic tickets into the receptacle, and, One to stand in the traffic bureau and shout "Sap at all motorists honest enough to deposit bail for parking violations."

Silly, isn't it? And yet, in substance, that's what's been going on here in Dayton, month after month, right under the olfactory organs of the city manager and the city commission.

If an officer assigned to the downtown district affixed overtime parking tickets to 10 automobiles a day it would take him 1500 working days to dispose of 15,000 tickets. Or, to put it another way, it would take five cops a whole year, doing nothing else, to get rid of such a sheaf of tickets.

Currently much ado is being made in city hall about a back-log of more than 15,000 over-time parking tickets which have been ignored during the past few months by motorists who have learned from experience that nothing would happen to them if they failed to deposit bail. Some time ago the city commission took cognizance of the situation and authorized the employment of three additional bailiffs in police court to serve citations on delinquent motorists. But somehow or other these bailiffs drew other court assignments and neglected the traffic citations. They continued to pile up month after month until, a week or two ago, the accumulation was brought forcibly to the attention of the city manager. He opined that "something would have to be done." And after due cogitation he recommended that the city forget all about the 15,000 delinguent motorists and start all over again with a new slate and, possibly, a new system, that is, if one can be worked out. And there the matter rests, with the three special bailiffs blithely going about other business; with Police Judge Paul Sherer idiotically pointing out that the courts were not estab-

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1952
THE PRESS

A Mess Is A Mess Is A Mess

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Published for revenue-raising purposes; with the head of the police traffic squad being quoted in the daily press as believing that any motorist who paid his traffic ticket is a sap; with the city manager, doubtless, laying plans for employing another corporal's guard of bailiffs to serve traffic tickets which are ignored in the future, and with the city commission, in its habitual bewilderment, wondering what to do.

We have several bits of advice to hand out:

To the city commissioners: keep all 10 eyes glued on the city manager.

To the city manager: pay more attention to getting the taxpayers' money's worth out of their dollars as you spend them and less on devising new ways of increasing the budget and building a bureaucracy.

To the head of the traffic squad: no man should be called a sap for being honest and obeying the law.

To Judge Sherer: we agree with you that the primary function of a court is not to produce revenue, but we disagree emphatically with the inference we draw from your remarks that if the penalties imposed by law happen to exceed the expenses of the court the penalties may be sneered at.

And while we're on the subject of traffic there are a few remarks we should like to address to our traffic engineer, J. Anthony Carrothers. He has been quoted in the daily press as saying that while the timing of traffic signals, especially in the downtown section, is askew, nothing will be done until after a survey has been made of the city to spot other traffic headaches.

That, J. Anthony Carrothers, we hold to be puerile reasoning. You have been here long enough to know that Dayton's traffic is in a pretty horrible mess. If you think you know one single reform that would improve conditions let's have it and have it NOW. If the timing of traffic lights is off--and everybody agrees with you it is--let's have a change NOW, not at some remote date after you have completed an exhaustive study of the whole city and have come up with a dozen other ills that have absolutely no bearing on traffic light timing. Let's have our traffic reforms one at a time so we may digest them, instead of all together in one big, soggy indigestible mass.

We had hoped that when you accepted the call to the wider Dayton field from Syracuse and became one more in a long list of imported experts, you would right evils when you found them instead of trying to make a showing by coming out with a voluminous report and overwhelming the community with your astuteness. We aren't so easily impressed, J. Anthony Carrothers. We want first things first and if you say the lights are mistimed, correct that error NOW and then go on to other reforms. If you have 50 of them we'll think as much of you if you feed them to us one at a time as if you held back and overwhelmed us with all 50 at once. Perhaps more! We aren't looking for a bargain; all we want is something for our money as we spend it.