USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Town of Newton annual report 1889 > Part 1
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26
Y
T
AND UN
OUNDED 16
Or
Y1
88.A CIT
IN
Councilman
George F. Richardson.
Newton Free Library 3 1323 01365 8249
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Boston Public Library
https://archive.org/details/publicdocuments1889newt
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
MAYOR'S ADDRESS.
REPORTS OF
CITY AUDITOR,
CONTAINING OFFICERS OF CITY GOVERNMENT, ELECTED AND APPOINTED). CITY TREASURER'S ACCOUNTS, ITEMS OF RECEIPTS AND EXPENDITURES, OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES, AND COMPILATION FROM RECORDS OF THE CITY CLERK.
BOARD OF HEALTH,
CITY ENGINEER,
CONTAINING ITEMS UPON HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION, WATER DEPART- MENTS, ETC.
CITY MARSHAL,
CHIEF OF THE FIRE DEPARTMENT, NEWTON FREE LIBRARY, OVERSEERS OF THE POOR, SCHOOL COMMITTEE, WATER BOARD:
ADDRESS
OF
HEMAN M. BURR,
MAYOR OF NEWTON,
JANUARY 7, 1889.
ERTY AND UNION
FOUNDE
A CITY 1873
1630
88,91
NONA
NTUM
ORPORATE
ATOW
NEWTON, MASS., NEWTON GRAPHIC PRESS, 1889.
THE MAYOR'S ADDRESS.
Gentlemen of the City Council :
Following a custom inaugurated with the establishment of the City Government fifteen years ago, we meet on this first day of the municipal year to take council together upon the proper discharge of the duties which have been entrusted to us by our fellow-citizens, to the end that we may give a faithful account of our stewardship when we lay it down at the end of the term for which we have been elected.
It is my pleasant duty to express to the people of Newton, for you and for myself, our deep sense of the honor which they have conferred upon us in placing in our hands responsibilities so grave.
The return which they seek from us for their confidence is a faithful and single-minded devotion to their interests. It is
4
your part to take the initiative in originating measures essen- tial to the welfare of the people and expressive of their will, while upon me devolves the duty of suggestion, supervision and execution.
Gentlemen who have served in the City Government will agree with me that an important qualification for the proper discharge of our duties is a thorough understanding of the laws and system under which we act. I therefore urge such of you as are without previous experience to study and to master the City Charter and ordinances, the joint rules of the City Coun- cil, as well as those of the branch in which you sit, and such of the statutes of the Commonwealth as have to do with munici- pal corporations and define the powers and duties of the vari- ous boards and officials entrusted with their management. It is my opinion that the ordinances of the City need revision, codification and indexing. As they now exist in the Municipal Register of 1883 they are incomplete and in places extremely obscure. Moreover, the enactment of city laws has not kept pace of late with the growth and needs of the people and with the introduction of new systems. The circumstance that the last edition of the Register is nearly exhausted makes the pres- ent a peculiarly opportune time for doing the necessary work. Believing that this labor can be better done by few hands than by many, I recommend entrusting it to a commission of three, one of whom shall be an alderman and one a councilman.
It is hardly necessary to call your attention to the condition of the Joint Rules and Orders. You are aware that some of their provisions are openly disregarded, while others are violated in spirit at every meeting of either branch of the City Council. I recommend that they be thoroughly revised, and I urge upon the committee on rules and orders the importance of going about the work at once. It is hardly for the credit of the City that her chosen servants should do their work under a system of their own creation, or at least adoption, to which they pay so scant respect.
5
The appropriations for the year now beginning have already been made up and cannot be exceeded by you except by a two-thirds vote in the affirmative in each branch of the City Council. This provision of our Charter I believe to be one of the wisest it contains. While leaving the making of the annual budget in the hands of men who have had nearly a year's experience of the needs, demands, and resources of the people, it does not restrain those who are to spend the money from levy- ing it, provided two thirds of them are willing to be held responsible for it by their constituents. The total appropriation for 1889 amounts to $587,624 an excess of $17,885 over that of 1888. The difference is perhaps not disproportionate to the year's advance in population and wealth. Bearing in mind, however, that the business of the country is not in a satis- factory condition and that in consequence the year's increase in the City's valuation is likely to be less than usual, I urge upon you the paramount importance of keeping well within the appropriation for each department. Heads of departments and chairmen of committees should look forward to the end of the year's work at its beginning. It should be their care, in homely phrase, to cut their coat according to their cloth ; no more work should be planned than can be satisfactorily accomplished with the means at their disposal, and in those departments where sudden exigencies calling for unusual expenditures are likely to arise, funds should be reserved to meet them. I believe in a policy of liberal expenditure in Newton. We have not made our City one of the most attractive and beautiful in the State and Nation by parsimonious and niggardly government. But there should be a caution and sagacity in our liberality. We should spend our money as we get it and not before we get it. The introduction of improved methods of lighting, the widening and building of highways, additions to the service and efficiency of the fire and police departments - all these should steadily keep step with the power and the wish of the people to pay for
6
them. We shall not go far wrong if we keep constantly before our eyes and learn justly to apply the principle that liberal government will attract to us new population and wealth, and that extravagance will as surely repel them.
In examining the addresses of my predecessors I have found in them many references to the faults and virtues of the City Charter and suggestions for its improvement. Believing as I do that our Charter is on the whole an instrument suited to the needs and conditions of the City, I shall not recommend that any action be taken with a view to substituting a new one in its stead. It is now but six years old and unless it was unusually faulty at its birth it can hardly have developed in its short life so many vices as to deserve death now. The Ameri- can people possess the great virtue of intelligent conservatism. They are slow to adopt and slow to change. They do not throw away a good gun because it has once missed fire. A distin- guished English writer has said, in an essay in which he criticized unsparingly the constitutional system prevailing in the States of the American Union, that it was no answer to say that Massachusetts, for instance, was well governed under it, " for the men of Massachusetts could make any constitution work." So I believe that the men of Newton can make any system of government work, even the very worst, just as I believe that the fellaheen of Egypt could make no system work, even the very best, and that the chief virtue is in the men who operate the machine and not in the machine itself. If, however, the instrument we have to use be dull and blunt in our hands it becomes us to throw it aside and get a better one. It may not be out of place, therefore, to examine some positions which have been taken by the friends of a different system.
Chief among them are two : first, that executive and legis- lative functions should be absolutely divorced, and second, that the City Council should consist of one board instead of two. It must be confessed that it is difficult to solve with perfect success
7
the problem of municipal representation for Newton. Probably no perfect system could be devised. It seems, however, safe to start from the principle that every real constituency should have a representation here, whether there be one or more of them. The United States Senate, for example, is the strongest and most respected second chamber in the world, and it is such mainly because it has at its back the States of the Union as sovereign political entities, consitituting real and powerful constituencies. I believe that there are two constituencies in Newton : that the people of the whole City make one and the inhabitants of the villages the other. Ward lines correspond closely to village divisions, and wherever we find a village we find a community with social, business and municipal interests that cannot always run on all fours with those of a neighboring village. Such political village interests as these find their fitting representation in the Common Council. We have for a second real constituency the whole City with its larger territory and life. If any change comes, or perhaps when a change comes, I believe that the membership of the Board of Aldermen should be increased, and that the residential qualification which limits their selection to the wards should be removed, thus preserving and bringing into clearer light the principal that the Common Council represents the ward, and the Board of Alder- men the City. The whole controversy, however, seems to me of little real value, and the question to be only incidental to larger ones ; in other words, a good Charter would be good and a bad one bad whether operated by two boards or one.
Let us return for a moment to the first argument- that which insists that executive and legislative duties should be sep- arated. The policy of this is evident to any formal capacity, but I think that those who press it most have sometimes over- looked the fact that the blending of functions so different has proceeded less from defects in the Charter than from some blemishes in the ordinances and the rules and orders of
8
the City Council, and from one notable provision of the Public Statutes, and that such evils as have arisen are not mainly " organic " and "inherent in the system," but either accidental or the natural out-growth of an ill-considered State law. Here again there is a principle which we can all stand upon, and I believe it perfectly safe to assert that the entire separation of executive from legislative duties is neither practicable or desir- able. Not to multiply examples, the Mayor in exercising the veto power vested in him by the laws of the Commonwealth. acts distinctly as a legislator, not as an executive. In such case he is simply a member of the legislature wielding more votes than his colleagues. Much, however, can and should be done, without going to the Charter at all. by means of changes in ordinances and rules. A Board of Public Works can be created by ordinance, the Mayor's seat in the Board of Health can be taken from him by a change in the ordinance which bestows it upon him, his power of appointing committees, which now be- longs to him only provisionally, can be taken from him by a change in the rules, committees which have assumed executive power nowhere granted them in the Charter, can surrender it. A careful study of our Charter and ordinances, and of the State laws that control and give direction to the workings of both, has convinced me that hardly a defect in our system of government is traceable to the former. If committees exercise, or are expected or compelled to exercise executive powers, they derive the right and are burdened with the duty thereto from sources wholly outside the Charter, so far as its character as an instrument independent of State laws extends. It remains to con- sider what they are. The Public Statutes, Chap. 31, Sec. 2 pro- vide that " The Mayor and Aldermen shall have the power and be subject to the liabilities of selectmen." Here I think is the plague spot-the germ of the partial paralysis that has fallen upon most of the municipalities of Massachusetts. When the old town government became unwieldy in the larger towns from the
9
size of the electorate, and it became necessary for citizens to leg- islate through representatives in a City Council, because it was no longer practicable to legislate by themselves in town meet- ing, there was an apparent desire to conserve the Board of Se- lectmen in a new body called the Board of Aldermen, and this desire found expression in the provision which I have quoted from the Public Statutes. Legislatures and framers of charters forgot for the moment that they were establishing a new office, that of mayor, whom in a loose and general way they invested with executive functions, and they forget that the City Coun- cil was delegated to legislate for the people because the people could no longer legislate for themselves. Understanding the source from which the evil has flowed, it is simple to trace the next step taken. The Board of Aldermen possessed and wielded executive powers and in course of time Common Coun- cilmen, sharing equal privileges with the Aldermen as members of the legislature proper, serving and working with them on joint committees, have come naturally and inevitably to assume the exercise of rights which are not theirs, and which should never have been granted to the co-ordinate branch. To reform the evils of the system it is necessary to go back to the cause of their beginning. The original mistake was made in not merg- ing the powers and liabilities of selectmen, almost purely executive officers, in those of the Mayor alone. This can be now corrected only by a repeal of the obnoxious statute, or such a partial repeal as will except Newton from its operation, and a change in the few words of our Charter that follow the statute. As a necessary corollary of this change there should follow a re- vision of such of the rules as give to the Mayor the selection of committees from the Board of Aldermen. Under our present system chairmen of committees may be executive officers of large powers and are very properly chosen by the Mayor, the chief executive, who is responsible to the people for the work done by them. Should the change which I suggest be
10
made, their selection should be left with the branch of the council to which they belong. Furthermore, as the Mayor now sits with the Board of Aldermen because he and they have been inade an executive board by the laws of the Commonwealth, there would be no fitness in continning the practice under a system recognizing him as an executive and them as the upper branch of the city legislature. I trust that the task of bringing about this important reform may go hand in hand with the revision of the ordinances which I have recommended and that, if my suggestions meet with your approval, one commission may be entrusted with the whole labor.
LIQUOR LAW.
The people of Newton by their vote at the polls have with no uncertain voice given in their usual verdict against the grant- ing of licenses for the sale of intoxicating liquors. With a public sentiment so strong and so wholesome to sustain them there cannot be the shadow of an excuse for officials who neglect to do their whole duty in enforcing the law. It is both my duty and my purpose to see that the will of the people is carried out and I bespeak to that end the cordial co-operation of members of the City Council and all good citizens. The peculiar obsta- cles that lie in the way of detecting and punishing violations of the law can be met and overcome only by official vigilance rep- resenting an alert and sensitive public opinion.
PLAY GROUNDS.
The agitation for a system of parks, which led in 1882 to the passage of a State law authorizing the City Government to take land under certain conditions for public parks and squares has unfortunately, I think, subsided. There is one great need of our people which has received far less consideration than it merits -the need of public play grounds. Having been famil- iar with our villages from my early childhood and remembering well the time when almost every vacant lot and pasture was a
11
playground, I have seen the boys of Newton driven from one field to another by the steadily advancing tide of increasing pop- ulation, until there is little left to them but the public streets and remote pastures and wood lots. It needs no persuasion of mine to convince you that this pressing need should no longer be overlooked, as the difficulty of supplying it becomes greater every year. The initiative has already been taken in one of the villages by a public-spirited local society and in a few months Newton Centre will contain a play-ground easily accessible to all the communities on the south side of the city. The same generous response with which the City Council met the applica- tion of the Newton Centre Village Improvement Society for assistance would, I confidently believe, be accorded to citizens from other parts of Newton coming to you on a like errand. Pending independent action from sources outside the City Gov- ernment I recommend the whole subject to your consideration, merely observing that if one or two large play-grounds are pro- vided for the whole north side of the city a settlement of the question will have been effected for a long time to come, per- haps forever. It is somewhat remarkable that the word " play- ground" is nowhere to be found in the act of 1882. If there- fore you decide upon moving in this matter slight additional legislation may be necessary.
GRADE CROSSINGS.
Recent unfortunate events had led to a strong movement in favor of abolishing grade crossings. It is yet too early to forecast the probable shape which a final settlement of this question will take. Engineering problems of great difficulty must first be solved and a right apportionment of the expense made. The City, the Commonwealth, or its unit for some purposes of administration, the county, and the railroad are all deeply interested in effecting a just settlement. Inasmuch as I apprehend that a satisfactory adjustment of all the con- flicting interests that are involved in the question may delay
12
its final settlement, I think that some action should be taken by you to procure at least a temporary relief. I have always believed that the existing dangers could be lessened by a differ- ent and more thorough system of gating and policing the crossings, and by constructing subways for the use of foot passengers where the traffic is greatest.
SEWERAGE.
Complaint is not infrequently heard of the inactivity of the City Council in pressing forward the establishment of a general sewerage system. In this matter as in others I think that the Council is fairly representative of public opinion, and I doubt if the people are quite ready to speak their last word on the subject. The day is fast appoaching, however, when the need will become too urgent to be over-looked, and it behooves you to meet it more than half-way. You should keep more than abreast of the public desire and be ready with a plan to satisfy it when its expression becomes unmistakable. The great uncertainty that exists of the final adoption, by the State, of the Metropolitan system for the Charles River valley makes it the more necessary for the committee on sewerage to be prepared in time with a plan which shall satisfy our local wants without regard to the co-operation of neighboring towns.
HIGH SERVICE.
There are in Newton one hundred and eighty persons living on ninety-one acres of land who are wholly without water supply, one hundred and thirty persons living on sixty acres whose supply is insufficient, or not to be depended upon, or both ; and two thousand six hundred and ninety persons living on two thousand four hundred and ninety one acres who are deprived by the inadequacy of the water supply of their full share of the advantages enjoyed by other citizens for protection against fire: making a total of three thousand persons living on two thousand six hundred and fifty acres
13
of land to whom their fellow-citizens are a privileged class so far as benefits derived from our system of water works are concerned. These people are, nevertheless, taxed for their part of the interest on the water debt and for their share of the cost of water maintenance, and are charged full water rates even though the supply extends only to the cellars of their dwellings. This is a condition of things which should be ameliorated and I trust that you will cordially co-operate with the water board in every vigorous effort to that end.
It has been usual for the Mayor in his address to review somewhat perfunctorily the work of the various departments and to impress their needs upon members of the City Council. As full reports are yearly published by the heads of depart- ments I shall omit giving an account in detail of their condition.
THE CITY TREASURY.
On account of the transactions of the finan- cial year ending December 31, 1888,
there are outstanding Temporary Loans. Bills unpaid, . 25,049 43
$109,700 00
Unexpended Balance of the Read Fund In- come, . 895 13
Total, $135,644 56
Against this there are :
Cash on hand,
$64,817 46
Uncollected taxes. good,. 95,000 00
Due the Treasury for advances made for the extension of water mains. . 396 30
Due the Treasury for advances made for the construction of the Bemis and Lower Falls bridges, 5,426 19
Total.
$165,639 95
.
14
Leaving a balance in the Treasury of, $29,995 39 There is further due from miscellaneous
sources, $17,000 00
Out of this balance will be paid the cost of providing the City Hall with ventilation, amounting to $2200. I recommend that $2500 more be taken from it for the play-ground and park at Newton Centre. This amount, appropriated by the City Council of 1887 and included in the tax levy of last year, has now been swept into the treasury and figures there as cash on hand. It should not in my opinion be diverted from its original purpose.
I further recommend that you pay for the new bridges out of this balance. The cost of building them, $16,000 for both, is now provided for by issuing notes of $1,000, the last of which will not mature for ten years. I do not think that our City will gain much reputation from such financiering. The City Council of 1887, expecting that the new bridges would be paid for out of the tax levy of 1888, excluded from the appropriation for that year the usual item for widening and reconstructing streets and appropriated $6,000 for repairing the bridges, in order that they might at least be made safe for winter travel in case they were found to be in a really danger- ous condition. The order appropriating this $6,000 was rescinded before the tax levy was made last year. The burden upon the tax-payers was therefore lightened by the whole amount theretofore devoted to permanent improvements in streets and was not increased by the appropriation of a single dollar for bridge construction. I do not think that it needs argument to convince you of the unwisdom of a policy of this kind, which lightens the burden for one year only to increase it the next. If you follow my recommendation you will increase the tax rate for the current year but you will have the satis- faction of undoing the unwise and unsafe financial policy of providing for small expenses by permanent loans.
15
Our liabilities at the close of the financial year were as follows :
FUNDED CITY DEBT.
Outstanding Bonds and Notes, and accrued
interest on the same, . $311,218 38
Sinking Fund for payment of the same, 28,963 68
Net Funded Debt,
$282,254 70
WATER DEBT.
Outstanding Water Bonds and accrued interest on the same, $1,192,400 00
Sinking Fund for payment of the same, 254,317 07
Net Water Deht, . $938,082 93
The Funded City Debt, December 31, 1887, was $384,507 48
Sinking Fund, 53,107 71
Decrease in Net Funded City Debt for the year 1888, . $49,105 07
Outstanding Water Bonds and accrued inter- est, December 31, 1887, were,
$1,141,900 00
Water Debt Sinking Fund, 222,811 66
Net Water Debt, . $919,088 34
Increase in Net Water Debt for the year 1888, . $18,994 59
Total decrease in the whole Debt for the year 1888, . $30,150 48
From this last total I think that every sound principle of financiering demands the deduction of $16,000, the cost of the bridges, which is strictly a city liability to-day, inasmuch as the work has been begun and payment by annual notes pro- vided for by order of the City Council. The debt, it is true, is
16
not yet funded and I trust never will be, but inasmuch as its funding has been ordered and will soon be accomplished unless you choose to pay it out of this year's tax levy, it must certainly be included in the list of the City's liabilities. The total de- crease is then $14,150.48.
There will mature this year School and Library notes amounting to $14,250, which willbe paid from the tax levy ; also a City note for $23,000, which will be paid from the tax levy through the agency of the sinking fund.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.