An unpublished report of the City Club of Milwaukee reveals a paralleling of city and county services at numerous points. The city was found to be maintaining an emergency hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium and a corps of milk inspectors, while the county maintained similar services through a general hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a visiting physician and a district nurse. The county jail and the police station were in close proximity but under separate jurisdictions. Where the county handled public works through an engineering department the city operated through a highway department, each unit requiring practically the same sort of administrative and technical direction. City and county did their purchasing separately and in the respective public works departments there was a duplication of testing laboratories and of engineering and other service records. Separate city and county regulative or governing bodies added materially both to the expense of government and to the number of elective officers.
Then again, the urban county, including judicial officers, has contributed more to the length of the ballot than any other division of government. In the year 1910 before the adoption of the present charter, the Los Angeles city ballot, which has been frequently exhibited as a horrible example, contained the names of candidates for forty-five separate offices. Twenty-eight of these belonged to the county-township system!
The Chicago voter, as the result of the early influences plus the additions to the number of offices which have been made from time to time, casts a ballot for about twenty-five candidates, including the sheriff, the treasurer, county clerk, clerk of the probate court, clerk of the criminal court, president of the county commissioners, ten county commissioners, judge of the county court. The voter in Omaha, in addition to the usual run of county officers, selects also thirty-two deputy tax assessors, all on a single ballot. In most states these officers are chosen on the same day and on the same ballot with a long list of state and judicial officers, so that the county election is only an incidental and minor issue in the whole complicated business.
On election day the urban county offices are usually found at the bottom of the ballot. Usually numerous and obscure enough in their own right in the country districts, their contributions to the obscurity of voting in the city are more than doubly important.
When to an immoderately long ballot, to duplication of functions as between county and city, there is added a multiplicity of local government units, all considerations of responsibility in government or intelligence of citizenship fall to the ground. Such is the case in Cook County, Illinois, where the Bureau of Public Efficiency has issued a striking little pamphlet on The Nineteen Local Governments in Chicago. (The number has since been increased to twenty-two.) Twenty-two separate taxing bodies, and one hundred and forty-four officials which every Chicago voter is expected to choose! Is it a wonder that “Mr. Voter,” to quote the title of an accompanying cartoon, is “dazed?” As the pamphlet says: “The large number of local governments in Chicago, with their very large number of elective officials, independent of one another, operates to produce not only inefficient public service but an enormous waste of public revenues. The present multiplicity of governing bodies, with a lack of centralized control and the long ballot, results in confusing complexity and makes gross inefficiency and waste on a large scale inevitable.”
The city too has proven itself an altogether unfavorable environment for clean, active county citizenship. A thousand and one preoccupations and distractions in the city have strongly tended to drive the populace to forget that it even lives in a county. The county does little for the city dweller. It does not keep his house from burning or his pockets from being picked. It does not build the streets on which he travels nor perform any humane services which could stir his admiration. The sheriff is no neighbor of his nor does he hear of that officer from one year’s end to another, unless it be his rare fortune to be a party to some legal action. The newspapers, to be sure, are apt to give a great deal of space to criminal trials and feature the activities of the district attorney. But even that is apt to be directed more to metropolitan sensationalism than to helpful citizenship.
The greater the power entrusted to the municipalities within the county, the more interesting things it is given to do, in just that measure does the county itself suffer from inattention on the part of the citizens, till the extreme is reached in a condition described in a report on Cook County by Prof. F. D. Bramhall of the University of Chicago:
“The city corporate stands in the mind of most men for their local government; it has its picturesque history, its visible physical embodiments, its corporate personality, its stimulus to the pride of its people and its claim upon their loyalty. The county can make no such appeal, and it is a political fact to be reckoned with that however you may urge that the county is an essential part of city government, that the city electorate is almost equivalent to the county electorate, and should assert an equal proprietorship, it is almost impossible to overcome the obsession that the county is an alien thing. There is no more serious consequence of the parceling out of our local governmental powers and the shattering of responsibility for our municipal housekeeping than just this forfeiture of the sense of identification with government and the force of local patriotism which should be a tremendous asset for American political government.”
Without a doubt, the urban, and particularly the metropolitan county, is the county at its worst.