The Indeterminate Permit in Relation to Home Rule and Municipal Ownership (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Indeterminate Permit in Relation to Home Rule and Municipal OwnershipIn the author's opinion state regulation as an exclusive or dominant policy has broken down. Its inherent weaknesses under our system of jurisprudence are fatal to its effectiveness for the full protection of the public interests. The proper func' tioning of utilities as cooperative urban services, intimately related to the essential functions of municipal government, depends upon a virile and continuous local con, trol. But local control, under private ownership, is subject to a fundamental infirmity which it has in common with state regulation, namely, the paralyzing influence of the jughandled jurisdiction of the Federal courts. These courts can do nothing for the cities or for the consumers, their jurisdiction is obtained solely for the purpose of protecting the companies. It follows that the road to utility service in the best sense of that term is through Municipal Home Rule, and the road to Municipal Home Rule is through public ownership. The next question is, what is the road to public ownership? The friends of the indeterminate permit point to its provisions and say that it enables a city to take over the utilities whenever it wants to. But there's a rub! Unless the city has the legal power to raise the money required to pay for the utilities, the effective credit to do so, and the educated will for initiative and self reliance, the mere words that declare an indeterminate permit terminable are mean, ingless. So far as this type of franchise is linked to state control, it tends to unfit cities for municipal operation by shutting them out of the picture while private operation continues. And the indeterminate permit in its characteristic form does not remove the financial limitations placed by constitution and statute upon the city's borrowing and taxing powers, and does not affirmatively confer financial powers upon the municipality.The danger that lies in terminable permit legislation such as has been proposed in Illinois is in the fact that it would give the utilities an indefinite lease of life without requiring them ever to come back to the municipality for an accounting of their stewardship, and without giving the municipality any effective power to cut theirlease of life short. Under the indeterminate permit. The companies and their good or Ill behavior has little or nothing to do with it.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.