MAKING THE CITY EFFICIENT
Sandberg, Carl
Making the City Efficient WHAT COMMONS AND HIS EXPERTS ARE DOING TO COMBAT WASTE By CARL SANDBURG WHEN MR. P. ARMOUR of Chicago—who killed and packed hogs for a pork trade that reached round the...
...The high priced flusher was the one bought...
...F. E. Turneaure, dean college of engineering, University of Wisconsin...
...In press are the following: Free legal aid, workmen's accidents, housing conditions, house drain and plumbing inspection...
...How it Works ONE ROOT of the evil is that the people don't know what they are getting for their money...
...The work of the bureau, besides continuing the installation of the cost system, is of two kinds: (1) municipal surveys (2) social surveys...
...Efficiency is the science and art of using everything except the squeal...
...By request of the public works department Professor Commons and his aides devised a cost system and made recommendations for improving the refuse incinerator service...
...The average American citizen in the average American city knows that in his city hall are tunnels and winding passageways where Easy Money changes hands...
...A separate pamphlet could be written on the crying need for advance in each of the fields mentioned...
...Locating the "Chair Warmers" "WHAT IS a department organization study...
...Bulletins have been published on the following subjects: Plans and methods, alarm telegraph systems, garnishment of wages, women's wages, the refuse incinerator...
...Their combat is against Waste...
...And the price of asphalt paving fell sixty cents per square yard...
...that's a hell of a business...
...And it may almost be expected that one of these days a German student with careless hair and a droop to his face will find a way to boil and can the squeal, while clever advertising men proceed to create a demand and make an eager public hurry to the groceries and buy a supply before the stacks of cans in the window are gone...
...The Milwaukee bureau came by invitation and has the backing, financial and moral, of the city administration...
...As consulting experts are Major Charles Hine, organization expert Harriman Lines, Chicago...
...This is through the reduction of the number of days per week of garbage collection, utilization of combustion chamber dust for asphalt filler and pickings from the refuse which have commercial value...
...Yes, efficiency is the science and art of using everything but the squeal, while at the same time putting the squeal under thorough chemical and microscopic teste to ascertain its uttermost possibilities...
...When the common council committee on salary revision wanted a list of the salaries paid to all employees in public works departments of cities approximating Milwaukee in size, the municipal reference library handled the work, saving the committee's time for other work...
...Charts give bird's eye views of departmental work and carry more information in a few minutes than can be gleaned from hours of reference and cross reference and winding amendments to amendments found in city charters, city ordinances and supplements and revised supplements...
...The social surveys will inquire into living conditions out amid the streets, homes and shops—health, sanitation, housing, workmen's accidents, standards of living, and like subjects...
...You locate the places where Easy Money is leaking into eager hands and when you know that you know how to stop the leak...
...She had been on the job from the time she was fifteen till she was twenty four years of age...
...Is the sewer superintendent an, appointive or civil service position...
...Cost System: Destroyer of Graft COST SHEETS—the cost system-all through the recent accomplishments of Professor Commons, you will see this playing a part...
...He has been an officer and a promoter of the American Association for Labor Legislation...
...The answer is that it is an inlook that locates any office fixtures that exist merely to connect with the payroll...
...There are research and efficiency bureaus in a few American cities but they are maintained by private subscriptions...
...Today these are worked up into pepsin for overworked people and fertilizer for overworked soil...
...A new street flusher was needed...
...Fingering over a properly kept cost system record, you know just how much is cost to the city for various services and hew much is not cost...
...Under the proposed consolidation of the two departments, such duplication of labor and expense will be discontinued...
...What would you think if one gang of men were to come along on Monday and rip up the street and put in a conduit for a fire alarm system and on Tuesday along were to come another gang and again rip up the same street to put in a conduit for the police alarm system...
...The exceptions are so few that when a city breaks from the sway of graft, it is thought remarkable and the word goes around, "Cleveland is free from graft" or "Milwaukee is free from graft...
...A Pioneer Work LET THE FACT be stated in closing that this bureau is doing a pioneer work...
...A Persistent Genius of Effective Toil JOHN R. COMMONS is one of those restless, persistent geniuses of effective toil whose life story needs much space...
...P. ARMOUR of Chicago—who killed and packed hogs for a pork trade that reached round the world—when Mr...
...What officers are appointed by the mayor?—by the public works commissioner?—by the school superintendent...
...A well-made, up-to-date cost system ought to be compared with a combination time-lock and burglar alarm contrivance that throws scalding water on those who try to get public money at the wrong time in the wrong way...
...The work is well under way, however, and by 1911 will be in use and of service at several important points...
...Two or three years may be required for the successful establishment and operation of the cost system in all departments...
...The beginning of this bureau was in June, 1910, when the Milwaukee common council appropriated $5,000 for experts to install a cost system...
...A good street does not merit such abuse...
...While thus trying to make the taxpayer's dollar go farther than before, they are also probing for definite facts about the life of the people toward the getting of better conditions of labor, play and opportunity for the masses...
...The makers of the successful flusher have gotten hold of the cost figures of the competition and are using them in their selling campaigns...
...Who's Who in the Bureau THE PERSONNEL of the bureau can be only a sort of roll call here...
...The recommendations already adopted will result in a saving of $16,267 each year...
...The daughter of the Chief Doorkeeper was on the payroll as the occupant of the position...
...They don't know whether they get a dollar's worth of pavement or only fifty cents worth of pavement for the dollar they pay...
...You can measure the extent to which the people rule and democracy prevails in a city by the degree in which it hires experts and combats special privilege...
...Why waste money on cables when children are clamoring in the streets for playgrounds...
...Besides his work as director of the Milwaukee efficiency bureau, he is teaching in the state university on labor questions and public utilities...
...But they do not know how much of the money they pay goes for extortion, graft, and waste, and how much is real value based on the costs involved...
...What these men are attempting to do is to get better use at all possible points of all materials, time and labor that the city of milwaukee is paying good money for...
...S. W. Oilman, consulting accountant President Taft's inquiry into economy and efficiency...
...H. L. Russell, dean of agriculture, University of Wisconsin...
...Observe how it worked in the garbage disposal system...
...If two men or six men are all doing parts of a work that should be centered under one man or department for responsibility and specialization, a proper organization study will bring out the facts...
...In Washington last summer, they found that the Clerk to the Chief Doorkeeper was getting $1,200 a year...
...Their labor is as much pioneer labor as that of the first backwoodsmen who cut trees and built log cabins on the Milwaukee river...
...Discoveries of this kind have been made with resulting improvement...
...Look at This Big Program IN CO-OPERATION with the city administration and civic organizations, the efficiency bureau has been connected with the appointment of commissions on tuberculosis, child welfare and milk supply...
...He was then surprised to learn that Milwaukee has made an alliance with the University of Wisconsin, that Professor John R. Commons at the head of the Bureau of Economy and Efficiency and the best brains of the state university are at the beck of the city's needs...
...The municipal surveys will study detailed operations, business transactions, accounting, organization and administration in departments of the city government...
...In the 1911 budget of the city, $18,000 was set aside for the creation of a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency, the understanding being that Professor John R. Commons should have direction...
...The getting together of such a staff, however, is one of the chief difficulties...
...He was a member of the National Civic Federation commission which reported on the conditions and merits of public and private ownership of public utilities, Commons being one to report in favor of the superiority of public ownership...
...Peter White, accounting and finance counsel, Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency...
...The old time country butchers used to throw away bones, blood and entrails of the hog...
...The cost system showed that the higher priced machine would flush more yardage and do more work per dollar spent for purchase and operation than the cheaper machine...
...Louis E. Reber, formerly dean of engineering in Pennsylvania State College, now dean extension division University of Wisconsin...
...On all sides the overwhelming testimony is that the healthiest and best governed cities in the world are those of Germany...
...And his quick answer was, "Education...
...A real department organization study will always find any lurking Clerk to the Chief Doorkeeper...
...No mystery at all in this...
...A cost system—with publicity—will break up graft and make better service in a city government quicker and with more lasting effect than any procurable battalion of lawyers and regiment of detectives equipped with dictagraphs...
...A few months later you may stand in a building the foundation of which is composed in part of the stuff you threw into the garbage can...
...Charts are being drawn which give by a short route a view of a department's powers and activities...
...Studies are in progress on city administrative organization, organization of the public works department, water works efficiency, water rates, street construction, street cleaning, construction and operation of sewers, management of public structures, ash and garbage collections, purchase methods, public recreations and amusements, special assessments, licenses and permits, health and sanitation, milk supply, sanitary inspection, communicable diseases, infant mortality, meats and foods, municipal education, free employment agencies...
...They are blazing a way out of the civic wilderness...
...asked the western man...
...Louis boss whom Joseph Folk had sent to the state capital, Columbia, for trial as a grafter...
...H. H. Jacobs, University Settlement, Milwaukee...
...The published bulletin enters fully into the details on the plan...
...He explained that to him an expert in municipal service is a fly-by-night man who comes when he is called, stays a few days, does his work, departs, and sends a big bill by mail for the later astonishment of the common council...
...He was engaged in the Pittsburgh Survey in a consulting capacity with special reference to wage earners...
...Some of them are civic cousins of the St...
...This incomplete annal may close with stating that he has been appointed a member of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission, that he is a utilitarian idealist of wide experience who has devised cost sheets in the stock yards of Chicago and steel mills of Berlin, Germany, and that he is a tireless worker with an eminent executive ability...
...They know what they pay money for...
...Where did you get your expert for this work and where is he now...
...Much "infloonce" but no cost system has prevailed...
...When they accomplish an advance it is against the desire of the intrenched political powers and most often by legal force accompanied by much agitation...
...As the state university is located in that city and is its principal institution, when the boss asked what was the business of the town, they told him, "Education...
...The bureau has shared in the establishment of a municipal reference library which is to do for the city what the admirable reference library headed by Charles McCarthy at Madison does for the state of Wisconsin...
...How are the members of the teachers' pension board appointed...
...THE EFFICIENCY BUREAU has recommended that the fire and police alarm systems of the city be combined...
...A like situation is found in almost all large American cities...
...While it was effected by an expert outside the Bureau of Economy and Efficiency, Superintendent Charles A. Mullen, who wrestled six months with cost records and specifications before he was sure he could "break the game," the incident illustrates the value of the cost system method which Professor Common's staff is installing in all departments where it has not been introduced...
...Of course, the efficiency bureau has it's enemies...
...He was a co-worker with Frank Parsons on "The City for the People," the foremost volume on city problems that America has produced...
...Among recommendations requiring delay for construction, the bureau shows that with an investment of $60,000, the steam from the incinerator should be worth $36,576 a year, while a $2,800 crusher will result in $7,020 yearly from the clinkers...
...Does the health department or the public works department have charge of the garbage collection...
...Efficiency utilizes all but the death cry...
...Put this clinker through a crusher and you have a material which is better adapted for foundation concrete than crushed rock...
...As associate director, Professor Commons has B. M. Rastall, a man of business experience who has had classes in business organization in the University of Wisconsin...
...They are the doers of an original work that will have a place in American municipal history...
...The garbage wagon comes along at midnight and hauls your refuse to the incinerator—a row of big furnaces in a building on the lake shore...
...When you throw a lot of potato peelings, meat bones, egg shells and other scraps into the garbage can in Milwaukee, that is not the last of it for you...
...is a question asked by municipal freshmen...
...And the important and fundamental points wherein German cities differ from the American is in the employment of experts and the municipal ownership of monopolies...
...He was shown a cost system record on garbage collection and how this cost system had revealed places for improvement and a reduction of operating expense by $16,000 a year...
...A Surprised—and Interested—Mayor A MAYOR of a large western city was visiting the office of the mayor of Milwaukee...
...Their Combat is Against Waste" NOW, ON THE TOP FLOOR of the city hall in Milwaukee, where you may gaze from the window on the houses and shops of a third of a million people, is a group of men endowed with the passion for efficiency...
...Similarly, if one wire is willing to carry both fire alarms and police alarms, why string two cables across the town instead of one...
...In Philadelphia, for instance, the same crowd of bland contractors has been getting the big jobs of public work from year to year...
...When these hot furnaces are done with your potato peelings, etc., mixed with ashes and rubbish, it has been changed into "clinker...
...In Milwaukee, a cost system was installed in paving...
...The choice was between two machines...
...P. Armour made the frank avowal, "We use everything in the hog except the squeal," he gave the best description of efficiency that has yet been offered to a waiting world of bunglers and blunderers...
...And just as the University of Wisconsin has in persiflage been called "the butter fat university," the bureau of economy and efficiency in Milwaukee has been dubbed "the brain trust...
...This will mean a saving of more than a quarter of a million dollars yearly in paving...
...Penny Foolish or Pound Wise...
...One conduit and one ripping up the street will now take the place of two conduits and two rip-pings...
...You have heard about watchdogs of the treasury, guardians of the woolsack, officers whose duty is to police the strong box where the public money is kept...
...All great things are barked at more or less and always there are by-standers who must be permitted to eat their peanuts and titter to each other while the builders build...
...Only three other American cities have such a library...
...Harrington Emerson, consulting efficiency engineer, New York...
...He has written four books, the most notable being "Trades Unionism and Labor Problems," a standard authority in America...
...They are called the Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Efficiency...
...But this hereinbefore-mentioned average American citizen is as much a desolate, powerless vagabond in his home city hall as an utter stranger without a guide amid the grottoes of Mammoth Cave...
...A cost system is different...
...In the street cleaning department, the bureau set in operation its deadly cost system...
...W. T. Sedgewick, head department public health and biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...The regular staff has from eight to twelve members, while fourteen have been engaged on special investigations in the social survey...
...Along with Lincoln Steffens' book, "The Shame of the Cities," should be a companion volume entitled "The Ignorance of the Cities...
...A like commission on housing is being considered...
...It was made public early in 1911...
Vol. 3 • September 1911 • No. 39
