Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-05-11
A NEW PROPOSITION.

A report was published yesterday that
the Mayor, the Controller and the Chief
of the Department of Public Safety are
about to become sponsors for scheme to
issue $4,000, 900 of bonds to be apportioned
as follows. $4,000, 900 for street improve
ments; s., 600, 900 for parks, and 81 900, 900
for bridges The report contains the sug-
gestive feature that these officials will
shortly leave the city, an adjunct of the
proposition conveying the unconscious
satire that such a course is the best thing
for public officials to do after such plan
has been made public.
We credit at least two of the three Off
cials named with understanding that such
a proposition would inevitably arouse in
the public mind the memory Of the bond
issues of twenty years ago and the train of
complications that followed in their wake.
1t is entirely competent for any public
official to urge the submission of such
proposition; but it is not hazardous to pre-
dict that it would meet with the
most strenuous opposition. The oppo-
sition would have the double founda-
ton of experience and reason. Pitts
burg has completely shaken herself
free from her old difficulties; she
has expended between 100000 and
S5,OOO,0O0 in improvements during the
past five years; she has opened two attrac-
tive parks, and got them into condition
which calls for gradual rather than
wholesale Improvements in future; and
she has accomplished all this by adhering
strictly to the principle of paying for the
work as it is done.
There is certainly nothing so imperative
in the improvements proposed as to call for
an issue of bonds. The parks can be more
judiciously improved by the policy of
gradual expenditure than by wholesale
outlay. Street Improvements can be
made as the property benefited is ready to
pay for it. The funds already available
for bridge permit the work to be done
before a site can be located. THE DIS
PATCH has stated its platform clearly in
favor of such expenditures as are neces-
sary to the welfare and progress of the
city. But the present industrial situation
indicates the wisdom of retrenching ex-
penditure rather than expanding it. In
these departments the proper policy is to
do the work required, and to pay for it as
it is done.
1t is gratifying to learn that the city has
a reserve of borrowing power, even if it Is
obtained by the energetic expansion of
valuations in the last assessment. But
that reserve should be kept for imperative
exigencies and not spent simply because
we have it to spend. For instance, there
is possibility that within the next few
years it may be necessary in order to OBJ
tain an adequate supply of pure water to
build conduit to some point where it
can be fed by mountain streams The
necessity may arise in some other form;
but whatever shape it takes it would be
sad commentary if the city were unable to
raise the funds because it had exhausted
its borrowing power the first year it had
any.
The work of municipal improvement in
order to be lasting must be gradual and
even conservative. At present, and in
view of the doubling of city taxation in
the past ten years, it is better to econ-
omize by postponing such improve
ments as are not imperatively necessary
rather than to launch out into profuse ex-
penditures to be paid for in the future.