Mr. Tawney. Mr. Jennings, we will hear you now.
Mr. Jennings. Gentlemen, I am not prepared to say very much on this preliminary report that has been made, the engineering part of it being out of my line, but I will say for the city of St. Clair that we indorse this project in principle, although perhaps the engineering points of it we might not agree with.
Mr. Tawney. You mean that your city indorses the results of the investigations so far as they relate to the treatment of sewage and the purification of water?
Mr. Jennings. Yes, sir; we are heartily in sympathy with the purification of water. We think it is necessary and we certainly shall do all we can to push the project along.
Mr. Tawney. Have you any criticism to make in respect to the standards proposed for the treatment of the water?
Mr. Jennings. Nothing that I know of. The preliminary plans as drawn up by your engineer I will leave for Prof. Weil, of St. Clair, to discuss with you. He is the consulting engineer of the Diamond Crystal Salt Co., and a man who is well up in his line.
STATEMENT OF PROF. CHARLES LEWIS WEIL,
OF ST. CLAIR, MICH.
Prof. Weil. Mr. Chairman, Mayor Jennings asked me to look over the plans and the report of the consulting engineer of the commission, which I have done. I am not here to report upon these plans from the standpoint of an engineer, but I am here simply as one having some interest in what should be done. What I have to say could hardly be construed as other than the impressions of one who has read the report and looked over the plans and is interested in the outcome. In fact, until Mr. Gardner made some statements to me here to-day I did not know just what the object of this meeting was. I understood that we were here to be instructed and not to make comments. So that, as I am trying to emphasize, what I have to say will be rather in the way of my impressions than carefully thought out criticisms or considerations.
As Mayor Jennings has said, I was impressed with the report in its entirety and not only as it relates to St. Clair but, seeing it for the first time yesterday, I admit that I read pretty nearly the whole report.
I was impressed with the fact that the plan proposed for St. Clair divides the city into two sections, with the point of purification as a division, and that might be objectionable from a real estate standpoint. It may not be practicable to do otherwise, but that is what they have done at St. Clair. Sewage disposal should be at the outskirts and not in the center of the city.