| Show TIlE TAX FOR SPRINKLING The propertyowners who object to tho Unreasonable extension of tho sprinkling district to include suburban property and burden it with a mostly useless tax are better informed as to what they need than are tho members of the city council The propertyowners suggest that the assessment as-sessment for sprinkling bo graded according accord-ing to the benefits derived therefrom The council on tho other hand has decided that the tax shall be uniform irrespective of the advantages the sprinkling may confer on the property taxed 1 The propertyowners seem to think that running a sprinkling wagon twice per day for a brief season past a lucern patch or orchard on Tenth East street fQr example ex-ample is not worth 1050 to the said lu cern patch or orchard Much less is it worth C33 because the lucern patch chances to be a corner lot These property owners have an idea that while 10 cents per front foot may not bo an excessive tax where property is worth from 500 to 1500 a foot and where by reason of the business transacted thesprlnkling is merely a good investment for the property affected still they cannot see that suburban orchards without business busi-ness transactions and worth less than 20 afoot a-foot should be taxed against the express wishes of their owners just as heavily as the valuable inside property is for work that the outside property doesnt need at all while the inside property must have it The council however has decided to commit com-mit this act of unequal and unnecessary taxation upon the outside proportyowners and it is no wonder that the latter have respectfully re-spectfully asked the council to amend in some just and equitable manner this piece of injustice There is no resident owner of a suburban i subur-ban lot that does not know it would cost him less than 1050 or than 83 to hire someone some-one to irrigate his lot during the season i To these lots irrigation is more necessary than street sprinkling and the proposition I proposi-tion to make this property pay a higher tax for street sprinkling than would cover the expense of actual irrigation ir-rigation is a crude sort of municipal statesmanship states-manship If it be desirable to provide a number of men with employment the council might hire them to dig plant hoe and irrigate these vegetable gardens and fruit orchards instead of wasting the water on the unused streets about them We have no objection to sprinkling the streets On the contrary we heartily approve ap-prove of it But the unreasonable extension exten-sion of sprinkling to property not correspondingly corres-pondingly benefited is an evil And thi not only because the outside property receives re-ceives less benefit from the street sprinkling sprink-ling but because the sprinkling there costless cost-less than half what it does in the thickl settled portion of the city A careless Indifference characterize s nearly every public undertaking of the municipal government So long as money can be raised by it no proceeding is deemed extraordinary no tax is deemed unnecessary unneces-sary or unjust |
