The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-04-18
THE CITY's CREDITORS.

The attempt of the creditors of the City
of San Francisco, who have or are soon to
have claims against its general fund for
supplies furnished during the current year,
to coerce its officials into making some
provision for their payment by the threat
of cutting off supplies, is of itself entitled
to but small measure of consideration.
These creditors cannot afford to put San
Francisco on their blacklist, nor persist in
q refusal to supply its various departments
with the necessary articles to maintain
them. The City of San Francisco, we
safely assert, is in no such state of abject
dependence upon few contractors. 1t is
not at all likely to go without needed sup
plies because it happens to have no ready
money in one of its several pockets. If
any particular body of contractors con-
clude that it is bad customer, there are
plenty of other contractors who are ready
to step into their shoes and take the
chances of being ultimately paid.
1t is none the less an important and very
serious fact that the general fund of the City
is empty at this distance from the end OF the
current fiscal year. 1t is, moreover, fact
which is getting into the habit of repeating
each fiscal year. The reason usually
assigned for this condition, viz: that the
City officials have been wasteful of its
finances, is not as a rule the true cause for
this poverty of the general fund.
The real reason rests in the well
established truth that every growing
city which by law or by conserva-
tism seeks to keep within an made
quate tax rate finds that its general
fund will persist In becoming insolvent
toward the close of each year. This is
because the annual expenditures of a city,
which increase most noticeably with its
growth, are in the main drawn from the
general fund. The salaries of officials, the
current expenses of the increasing offices,
the furniture and sundry expense &C
counts and the like are augmenting
charges against this fund. The revenues
from which the general fund is replenished
never keep up with its increase of outlay,
and the result is inevitably that as the city
grows its funds and finances get into tan
gle which becomes more hopeless with
every years devotion to the illogical policy
of growing great by dollar limits and free
dom from debt.
The truth is that San Francisco has too
long allowed its finances to be dictated by
the tax shirker and the silurian and has
dreamed that in a debtless idleness and
dollar limit lay the hope and fruition of
municipal prosperity. The exact opposite
is the only theory and practice by which
modern cities, especially in the United
States, have been able to grow great and
populous.
The time has come for San Francisco to
adopt new financial policy; to get out of
the sad straits in which it finds itself; 10
have its name taken off the blacklist of it's
own business men; to amply provide each
year for the payment in full of its floating
Indebtedness and to borrow few millions
of dollars with which to beautify itself and
make such permanent Improvements in its
street and sewer systems as the time de-
mands. Such policy would put an end
to the petty worrying and squabbling in
which its officials find themselves forced to
annually engage in order to make ends
meet in the expenditure of moneys which
are entirely too meager in amount for the
increasing needs of an expanding city.