Wheeling register. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.) 1878-1935, 1899-05-05
MUNICIPAL LIGHTING.

MUNICIPAL LIGHTING.
| The agitation of municipal owner
ship in New York city has created a
great furry among the private gas cor
porations of the metropolis. To head
| it off they have cut prices in half, three
companies reducing the price from
| $1.10 to 60 cents at clip, while an
ether company made still greater
cut, reducing the price to an even half
| dollar.
| Experts show that gas is produced
in New York at a cost of 35 cents
| thousand, so that there is plainly
good profit in it at fifty cents.
| In view of this situation in New
York, let us look into the situation in
| Wheeling
| AS it stands it is sufficient to make
every intelligent and honest citizen
sick at heart and disguised with the
objectionable mismanagement of the
city's interests in this connection. 1t
would seem to show that while NUM-
cipal ownership, in which Wheeling
was pioneer, is unquestionably the
proper thing, it is practically worthless
if the municipal control is in improper
| or incompetent hands.
For more than a decade the city has
done nothing but blunder in this con-
nection until now it stands to lose not
only all its valuable property and
plants used in gas and electric lighting,
but to return once more to the thral-
dom of private ownership and private
monopoly prices.
1t is disheartening that this should
be so, and that municipal ownership
should prove a failure in this city just
at a time it is meeting its most pro-
nounced success elsewhere throughout
the country.
Wheeling started on the right line,
and the effect of municipal ownership
properly and intelligently managed
was shown in the reduction in the
price of gas in this city from $3.50, I'M
der private ownership, to Is cents I'M
der municipal ownership.
Then electricity stepped in and to
meet the Improvement the city built
costly electric lighting plant with
view to continuing the blessings of
municipal ownership of the new light.
AT this point, however, the citys
troubles began. 1t foolishly gave a
franchise to a private concern without
any safeguards whatever being thrown
about the citys interests. Of course,
the city was promptly euchred out of
its rights and this private company
has since deprived the city of
its best customers. Other large users
of electric light, unwilling to
stand the burden of this mon
opoly's charges, have put in private
plants of their own. Thus the city is
left with costly gas plant on nand
and a costly electric lighting plant for
street lighting purposes, whose running
expenses, which are a dead loss, are
saddled onto the reduced earnings of
the old and waning gas plant, whose
revenues are about half what they
should be.
Unwise and incompetent manage
ment, or worse, has simply permitted
the city's interests and valuable pro-
perty to go to rack and ruin in the
very face of repeated warnings and
protests.
To cap the climax of the outrages
upon good government and the rights
of the people Council has now deliber-
ately given away as free gift anoth-
err franchise to another private cor
poration which desires to get the city
in its clutches and wrest from her
what paltry control of this public util-
ity she still possesses.
Considered as a climax to the I'M
pardonable frittering away of the city's
rights in this connection this latest
outrage by Council would seem to call
for public indignation meeting.