Buy Our Waterworks, or We'll Sell You to a Syndicate
Tacoma's Light and Water Company files its inventory for a $1.75 million city buyout — and a critic notes that the company has always known how to win a Tacoma election.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Tacoma Light and Water Company is now complying with all the requirements necessary to make legal the sale of its water and electric plant to the city. Besides, it is showing great interest in rustling out all its friends to register in order that they may be qualified to vote. It filed today with the county clerk a schedule of the property to be purchased. Among the items are the reservoir, dams, pump stations, stand pipe, suction pipes, distribution system and the Spanaway lake conduit. In the electric plant is included the arc and incandescent plants.
Some of the items in the electric plant are abbreviated in this manner:
100 H. P. Thompson-Houston power generator. 175,000 C. P. Westinghouse alternating plant. 14 Thompson-Houston lights, 2,000 C. P. dynamos.
In this respect the schedule may puzzle some taxpayers and prove unsatisfactory. The freight rates, costs of setting up switchboards, buildings and all material is included. In the water plant all the drawings and profiles of all water supply surveys made are included, and for four years Puyallup is given an option on 500,000 gallons per day of water from Maplewood springs. The company's real estate is comprehensively itemized.
A gentleman who has been looking into the water supply question says: "The water service in Butte, Mont., which is brought from a reservoir thirty miles distant in the mountains, where a dam alone cost $280,000 and which supplies as large a population as in Tacoma, has not cost $1,000,000. And an experienced electrician in this city says that a better electric plant than the company has can be built for $200,000." The opinion of Col. Griggs, a large and experienced contractor, has already been published. He is entirely friendly to Mr. Wright, but says that $1,000,000 is all the city ought to pay for the water and electric plants.
It is evident, nevertheless, that the company expects to carry the trade through and make the city pay three-quarters of a million dollars more than the plant is worth. The company has usually been successful in our city elections. It knows how to carry them. But this time additional arguments are to be used. The first is the threat that if the city does not buy at the price named, Mr. Wright will sell to an Eastern syndicate, though it is not pretended it will be for so much money, and that this syndicate will cinch the city in more excessive rates than the company is charging. The second is an offered bribe, to be passed at second-hand from Mr. Wright, that if the city gives him $1,750,000 for this plant he will put the money, or a part of it, into an extension of the Hunt railroad system to this city. If he would make that a part of the purchase contract in writing the people would probably vote to buy, but not many will be influenced by the proffered bribe unless it is put down in black and white.
“The company has usually been successful in our city elections. It knows how to carry them.”
Tacoma was being asked to buy its own water and power from a private monopoly that openly campaigned in city elections — the same fight over public ownership and franchise power that produced Seattle City Light in 1910 and still shapes utility rates and franchise agreements across the Puget Sound. The 'we'll sell to an Eastern syndicate' threat is the ancestor of every modern argument about outside capital holding a city's infrastructure.
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