Extra Work Entailed

The work of building sewers has entailed a great deal of extra labor without any increased compensation upon all parts of the city government. For instance, the street commissioner works every night until eleven o'clock or after, with the assistance of his family, transferring the time stubs of the small army of men employed on to their accounts, making out separate bilis for each man, showing the number of hours he worked each day and his compensation. All this is in addition to his ordinary hard day's work with the men. When the city clerk bas gone all through the bilis and seen that the amounts are correctly carried out and added up, then he makes up his long finance reports and sees that everything is footed to a cent. The finance committee with the clerk go over all the bilis. Then, after the council has passed upon the bilis the clerk has to draw off a warrant for every hand employed on the sewers. Sometimes one man will have five or six orders, having assigned parts of his account to various parties. The clerk, also, is obliged to conduct a large correspondence in reference to the sewers and the bonds, besides attending all the various meetings of the board of public works and council committees in reference to it. The mayor, besides keeping himself generally informed concerning the sewer and signing his name over 500 times on the bonds, has to countersign all the extra warrants drawn each month. The board of public works are required to give a great deal of their time to the work of constructing the sewers, without any monied compensation whatever. The aldermen also have many knotty questions before them on the subject and they to devote their time and brain work without compensation. Thus it will be seen that the regular city officers have had a great deal of extra work imposed upon them by the building of sewers without a cent of extra compensation. The Myers ballot people made a dead set at the city council to induce them to order an election to see whether or not the people wished to use the machine system of voting, the balloting to be by the Myer's machine. The Myers people have an excellent machine, and if the state had adopted it for all elections, it might prove an improvement over the present voting method. But the state only permits it to be used in municipal elections, and its adoption for such elections would require our people to be familiar with both the present and the old method of voting, both of which would have to be carried on at the same election. The council very wisely declined to accede to the wishes of the Myers people. Business before and after the holidays in this city has not been so dull as many predicted. Comparing Ann Arbor with other towns, should make the citizens of Ann Arbor feel happy. The question of lighting the city is again bothering the council. Possibly the present schedule of lighting may be changed. But whatever is done in the matter should be done only affer mature consideration and not on any momentary impulse.