Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
[C] But I ought to add that this mismanagement of State
charitable institutions is duplicated in the management
of other State departments that came under Mr. Roberts’s
observation. Although more than $24,000,000 have been
spent on the new Capitol, it proves to be too small
for the purposes it was designed to meet. Mr. Roberts
recommends the conversion of the old State Hall into a
finance building. The State Library has become so large
that it will soon require a separate building. The racing
tax law was so bunglingly framed that the collections
under it in 1896 were attended with “more difficulty and
expense than usual.” As the forest-preserve law stood in
1896, it permitted people purchasing State lands to strip
them of lumber, and then, owing to certain irregularities
connected with the sale, making it illegal, to recover the
money originally paid with interest at six and seven per
cent added. Because of the absence of any law covering
the personal expenditures of members of legislative
investigating committees, claims for seven and eight
dollars a day are rendered, although four or five dollars
a day are believed to be ample. Let me add that these
investigations, which, during the period from 1879 to 1896
inclusive, cost $823,534.51, reveal another source of
waste from State management. Still another source of waste
is State printing. Pointing out the “growing expenses of
State printing,” Mr. Roberts shows that they have increased
from $95,029.51 in 1887 to $315,585.81 in 1896. At one time
the law was so defective that it was impossible to frame
specifications for bids that would allow for printing of
different kinds. For example, blanks varying from two to
three inches square to two and three feet had to be classed
in the same schedule and price. A needless quantity of
reports is printed. Some of them are printed in the highest
style of the art and richly embellished with expensive
plates and engravings. One report for 1895 cost $42,000,
and others cost as high as $20,000 and $30,000. “It does
not seem logical,” says Mr. Roberts, commenting on this
extravagance, “to spend as much on the illustration of a
report as it costs for clerk hire in many departments.”
Another evil is the failure of the Legislature to
appropriate money enough to meet the printing bills each
year, thus making it necessary either to borrow money to
pay them or to compel the printer to wait for his pay
at a loss of interest on the amount due him. In this
connection attention must be called to the failure of the
Legislature to provide money enough to cover expenditures
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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