The Tenement House Department looks after the 103,882 tenement buildings of the city, and has a force of 193 inspectors, of whom eight are women. There are still about 9,000 dark rooms in the old tenements, built before the law was passed requiring a certain amount of light and air, which have not been made over to meet the new requirements.
The Street-cleaning Department employs regularly about 5,400 men at salaries ranging from $720 to $860 a year.
The Board of Inebriety was organized to take charge of persons who are chronic addicts to alcohol or drugs, to treat them as victims of disease, and send them to a farm where treatment looking toward a cure is combined with farm work, truck gardening, etc. The great needs of this work cannot be met until further accommodations are made for patients.
The Municipal Civil Service Commission, consisting of three members appointed by the Mayor, maintains a regular staff of examiners of applicants for city positions. The regular payroll of the city includes nearly 85,000 persons, of whom about 30,000 are not under the jurisdiction of the Civil Service. There are also about 20,000 others who are employed part of the time.
There is a free public employment bureau which is growing steadily and is placing over two thousand applicants a month, and a Commissioner of Weights and Measures.
The management of each one of the large departments of city government requires special and technical training. A corporation manager would search the country for the best man to be found for each particular department.
School-teachers and school superintendents are chosen because of their training and experience. Minor city employees are appointed from Civil Service lists; but the custom of American cities is to appoint men at the heads of city departments who have distinguished themselves for party service.
The Budget for Greater New York is made up, beginning in June, and being adopted November 1st. Estimates of the needs of each department for the coming year are submitted to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, and are studied by sub-committees who conduct public hearings, when the representatives of each department and the official examiners report on their estimates and each item may be examined and discussed. A tentative budget is printed for public use and the last week in October public hearings are held. By November 1st the budget must be adopted by the Board of Estimate and Apportionment and sent to the Board of Aldermen for their approval.
“Pay as you go” was a financial policy adopted in 1914 to relieve the tremendous piling up of future indebtedness of the city for permanent improvements of the non-revenue producing class. During the years 1914-1918 an annually increasing proportion of the cost of these improvements was to be included in the tax budget, and by 1918 the entire cost was to be met by taxation, and thereafter no bonds were to be issued for this class of improvement. Every dollar borrowed at 4½ per cent. interest on a fifty-year bond costs $1.69 in interest charges. While taxes are higher for a time under the pay-as-you-go plan, the actual cost of improvements to the city is much less.
The Mayor of New York City is the head of a corporation whose budget of expenditure, in 1916, was $212,000,000. Before the war the general expenses of the United States Steel Corporation were about $34,000,000 a year. The salary of the president of the Steel Corporation, or of any one of the largest business corporations of the country, would be from $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The Mayor of New York City receives $15,000 a year. But a business corporation would insist on having for president a man whose training and business experience had made him peculiarly fitted for the job, while our practice in choosing a man for mayor is to give little consideration to special training and experience in the work of city administration.