The Alameda County plan referred to in the preceding chapter provides for a city-and-county manager who would have charge not only of county administration but of the execution of the policies of the several constituent boroughs.
Such are a few definite proposals for fundamental political reconstruction of the county. Recalling, again, the low estate of our city governments, a decade since, the hope for an early and thoroughgoing betterment of the county system, in the department of fundamental structure, would seem to be not altogether vain.
[21] November, 1912.
[22] Otho G. Cartwright, Director of Westchester County Research Bureau.
[23] For text see Appendix, pp. 251-256.
CHAPTER XVIII
SCIENTIFIC ADMINISTRATION
Better county government, however, involves a good deal more than a mere skeleton of organization. It is not enough to provide the means for fixing responsibility in a general though fundamental sense, in officers who are conspicuous and powerful. That is the beginning of efficiency. And yet “responsibility” in its greater refinements, in its more intimate applications, is precisely the key to what all the various prophets of better government and public administration are preaching. Turn on the light! That is what the Short Ballot movement proposes by the more sweeping fundamental changes in the structure. Turning on the light is also essence of the doctrine of better accounting, better auditing, better budget making, better purchasing and the whole tendency to greater publicity in the conduct of public affairs.
Those county commissioners out in Kansas and Iowa who paid too much for their bridges—what was the real trouble with them? A writer in the agricultural journal which exposed these scandals wound up his article with an exhortation to the people to “elect good honest men.” Such advice was at least a shade or two more constructive than the political preaching of a century ago (which still has its adherents) that public officials tend inevitably to become thieves and crooks; that the best that we can do is to tie their hands by ingenious “checking” and “balancing” devices until it is almost impossible for them to move. To-day one group of political reconstructionists says: “Give these officers plenty of power, and then watch them,” and another group, supplementing the former, says: “Give officers the means of knowing exactly what they are doing; give also the public the means of watching intelligently and minutely; and if their public servants go wrong it is ‘up to the people,’” actually as well as formally. One is quite safe in assuming, for instance, that the offices of those middle western county officials were terribly “shy” on reliable data on bridge construction with which to meet the wiles of the combined contractors.
To begin with, what kind of a bridge was most needed? Did they have records as to the volume and weight of traffic which was likely to come over the structure? Did they seek light from an engineer of untarnished reputation or did they just trust to their “horse sense” and the fact that they “had lived there all their lives and they ought to know, if anybody did”? What did the records in the county engineer’s office show as to the relative durability and maintenance expense of steel bridges as against wooden bridges, under the peculiar local conditions?