< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu
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AMERICAN MUNICIPAL PROBLEMS

379

Portland are financed by bonds. The prices the city can get for them have dropped. This is the price received for the 6-per-cent. ten-year bonds. Longtime bonds, which are used to raise revenue for building public docks, constructing additions to the water system and other purposes, have no present market. No bids were received on a recent issue of $150,000, 25-year 4-per-cent. dock bonds. Ordinarily these bonds sell about 90 per cent. Whether or not the war is retarding the development interest of citizens by diverting attention can only be guessed. Entrenchment in municipal improvements of this kind has been noted, however, for a year or more past. It has been more pronounced since the war, but whether it is the outcome of the war or due to local or national financial conditions, or conditions purely local to the improvement districts affected, can not at this time be definitely ascertained. Apparently the war has no effect on partisan affiliations of citizens.

Seattle reports that the Eurpoean war "has not appreciably affected municipal conditions in Seattle, unless perhaps it may be in bringing more sober attention to matters of taxation and the like," certainly a most desirable result, and right here it may be pertinent to remark that increasing federal and state expenses are destined to have the same effect.

So far as the Pacific coast is concerned there is practically but one story. The same is true of the central sections. The report from Duluth, Minn., reads:

Apparently the war has had no effect here on municipal conditions. Street work and other improvements are going ahead as if nothing had happened, and the city is now having a very warm debate on the question of purchasing the electric lighting plant or building a new one.

That from South Bend, Indiana, is to the same effect:

The European war has produced little or no effect upon municipal conditions in South Bend. I do not believe it will interfere with any public improvements;

and Louisville, Ky., likewise:

We can note no effect whatever of the war conditions in Louisville.

A well-known editor of Kansas (William Allen White of The Emporia Gazette,

can not see that the European war is having any effect on the small cities of the West.

Another declares that

the war is making little difference with politics in Minneapolis. We have the

non-partisan city ballot and war and social issues are kept out of the campaigns.

The northwest generally, being near the wheat-fields, is not much affected by the war at present.

A Chicago editor in September felt that the war was likely most seriously to divert attention from local politics, and declared that the primary elections showed a distinct falling off, due to the absorption of interest in the war. The November elections, however, do not seem to have been any less hotly contested and their results can hardly be

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