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Show 5, P. ATTORNEY ; I REVEALS RULING California Commission in Ac- cord With Uniform Percentage Per-centage Plan Following newspaper report of the decision of the California state rall-ioaii rall-ioaii commission granting the application appli-cation of the carrleis for Increased intrastate in-trastate rates, Henley C. Month, South' rn I'aeil'ie 1 1 1 1 : j 1 1 atlormy, I who presented the ease to the com-I com-I mission for all of the steam railroads j and most of the electric railroads I Issued the follow ins explanatory i statement: "The California commission Is following fol-lowing the same percentages as those I fixed by the Interstate commerce I commission is in accord With the ma- jority of the state commissions thai So far have acted on the applications l of carriers to conform to the trans-port.'itinn trans-port.'itinn mi iv making the interstate pi r'-entnTi uniform In the Mate.-; Th,- ; ordi r "f i he Interstate common e com- mission was entered after a erv full (hearing to which the state commissions commis-sions were Invited and In which most of them participated. It was In pursuance pur-suance of the national plan of rate regulation established by the transportation trans-portation act, 19:'o, which Is that the ; interstate commerce commission shall divide the railroads of the country In- ! to groups, value them by BUCh groups, I and establish rates by such groups j which shall produce a fair return on J the group valuation so ascertained. RETURNS DIFFER. "The act states thai it is expected j that such methods will produce- in the I case of some Individual roads or HySr tems more than a fair return on the . value of the property. Such excess j , is taken care Of by the provision that one-half shall be paid to the United States to bo loaned to less fortunate I roads for the purpose of purchasing equipment mil for other specified! j purposes. The remaining one-half la j to be placed by the railroad in separate separ-ate nind which can be drawn unon only Tor certain specified purposes! and under the supervision ot the In-tirstate In-tirstate commerce commission The plan is one of the stabilization of transportation system, not by the State lines oi by iho individual roads but bj the transportation groups. It recOKnlzes mat the nation must have proper transportation and that! whether the railroads bo publicly or privately owned or operated they must' oe supported either by adequate rates or b public taxation. Adequate rates ar0 equally distributed und are certainly cer-tainly and economical collected. If a transportation deficit resulting from too low rates is paid out of the public treasury it means the continuance of a large part of the present burdensome burden-some taxation under which there Is an inequality, great expense of collection collec-tion and mucn evasion of failure to i. turn taxes collected, In addition to the furnishing of excuses for both large and petty profiteering. OUTJjINE TERR TORY. 'The Interstate commission used as one of the bases for Its order the gross revenues from both state and interstate inter-state business of all the railroads of the mountain Pacific group the tci-ntory tci-ntory west ol Cheyenne, Denver i-buquerque i-buquerque and Kl i aso In the' figures fig-ures for this group, but ..ot separately separate-ly stated ln the commission's ordi r were the gross receipts for 1919 of all the railroads in that group from both state and interstate business These Included the gross receipts arising aris-ing from the operation by the dlrec-toi dlrec-toi K 1 1 e ral of Southern I'aelfh Santa te. Salt Lake.. Western Pacific and Northwestern Pacific lines in California Califor-nia during (hat year, which were intrastate in-trastate that is to say where the haul was entirely within California i freight, $43,i65,6i'0 44. passenger, ; MS,0,164.69: Interstate that is California's proportion of interstate' lousiness beginning or ending within the state Freight. 152,692,821 0t paasenger, 116,674,240.72 These figures fig-ures phoW the extent to which the voluntary concurrence and CO-opera- tion of the commission wa-s neccssan . in carrying out the national plan Smaller roads ln California of course bad a much larger percentage of local lo-cal or state business. ELECTRIC ROADS. "While most of th. electric roads not operated in connection with steam lines were not subject to the commission commis-sion s order it is well recognized and was shown that the financial condition condi-tion of most of them was very much worse than that of any of the steam roads, of the electric lines the interstate- commerce commission said: "The operating cost of these lines have on the whole increased in ,ip-proximat. ,ip-proximat. ) the .-uine ratio as those of steam railroads. In addition to this there was the controlling consideration con-sideration that In practically all cases these electric lines are competitive With Steam lines, which necessitated i he maintenance of the same rate j level." |