Plans, Specifications, Supervisi ns, Reports for Water, Sewers, Electric Light, Hydro-Electric Development PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY The League of Minnesota Municipalities Entered as second-class matter April 28, 1916, at the Post Office at What is being done to utilize the climate in your community? There is no reason for not storing up this winter's coolness to mitigate next summer's warmth. MINNESOTA MUNICIPALITIES published last year an article by H. A. Whittaker, of the State Board of Health, in which it was shown that freezing effects a natural purification of the water which makes the ice. If it comes from a lake or stream four or five feet deep, and is clear and clean and solid, natural ice is just as good from a sanitary standpoint as artificial, and it ought to be quite as cold. It would save a great deal of fuel and ammonia next summer to put up ice now, instead of freezing it then. If municipal officials can do it, they will be serving the public interest in encouraging the doubling or quadrupling of the natural ice harvest this winter. Fuel Minnesota has indeed been fortunate this year in her fuel supply. Certainly there has been curtailment in some respects. Streets have been dimmed. which for long had been brilliantly lighted, and the moonlight schedule has returned to power. Other municipal activities dependent upon coal have been diminished wherever possible. But as compared with New England and New York and Ohio and other states nearer the coal fields than we, Minnesota has scarcely felt the coal shortage enough to realize that it exists. There has been no imminent threat of fuel famine to householders, no such stringent denial of fuel to enterprises deemed non-essential to the conduct of the war, no such shortening of the winter business day, as Boston, New York, Baltimore, and even Chicago have known. And if we were to compare our supply with that of our associates in Europe, and what they are enduring with the inconveniences which have touched us, we are not suffering at all. What of next year? It were foolish to suppose that there will be the over abundance of antebellum days, however much coal may be taken from the mines. Nor is it to be thought that the Northwest can again secure a share as adequate as that of this year, if it should mean a repetition of the extreme shortages of this year in other sections. We should neither expect nor desire that Minnesota will be given exceptionally favorable treatment. This does not mean that the people of the villages and cities will freeze next winter. It does mean that they should not expect to see their white ways again burning full so long as the war lasts, if that would mean the consumption of coal in extra amount. It means that coal should be conserved wherever possible, and used with a strict economy where it must be used. There are several things which municipalities and municipal officers can do to meet the situation. They can find out now where it will be possible to use wood in place of coal, and can take steps to have enough wood got out for such uses, if there is any wood nearby. And they can urge the citizens of their municipalities to do likewise. They can in some cases substitute oil or gasoline or gas engines for steam engines in electric plants, and produce their current at less cost than before into the bargain. They can in other cases substitute water-generated current and so have their lights without the use of coal at all. And they can and should encourage, by appropriate publicity and by adjusting rate schedules when necessary, the wider use of electric current for cooking. Smoke A black-smoking chimney is a source of nuisance to residents within a wide radius of it, an uglifier of streets and houses, a discourager and a killer of trees and other vegetation. It is also an indication of wasteful and inefficient consumption of coal. Every pound of soot is a pound of fuel that failed to burn. By properly constructed and adjusted fireboxes, and by proper firing, the smoke nuisance can be largely done away with, and the waste at the firebox stopped. Now would not be a bad time to pass a smoke ordinance. It should be one that could be understood and enforced, and one which, when enforced. would be effective. Its passage and enforcement should be accompanied by a campaign of education on proper methods of burning fuel so that it will not be wasted in smoke. Soot and Scale It doesn't take a very thick deposit of ashes or soot on the heating surfaces of a boiler, whether in a power or a heating plant, to keep out a quarter of the heat which the clean metal would take through. That means that a sooty furnace will send a great deal too much heat up the chimney in order to get the water hot enough. It pays to keep the soot layer thin. If the water in the boiler is hard there will soon be deposited scale enough to do as much damage as the soot outside. The first remedy is not to use such water if it can be softened, and the next is to see that the scale is removed frequently. The Program The ex To what topics should the League devote the next convention? ecutive committee can formulate the program better if it has the ideas of the membership before it. So please send in any suggestions you may have. Address them to the Secretary-Treasurer or the Executive Secretary, and they will receive careful consideration. Food* By A. D. Wilson, Federal Food Administrator for Minnesota Mr. President, I imagine you gentlemen are very much more interested in the preparation for the feed down below than you are in a discussion of the food administration work up here. I should feel, however, somewhat complimented by the proportion of you who came up here if I had not seen just how it was done. I noticed that there was no other way to go than up here; so I do not take any credit myself for attracting you in this direction. It is rather appropriate, however, at this late hour to talk about something to eat, and I come to you not with a plea for sacrifice, but rather with an opportunity that I know every man in America is looking for, and that is an opportunity to do his bit in this big war game in which we are all engaged at present. It is not doing very much, you know, to lend Uncle Sam money at four per cent interest. You would otherwise put it into the bank at that rate of interest, and to lend it to Uncle Sam certainly gives you just as much confidence that you are going to get it back as it does to deposit it in the bank. But I have a proposition to present to you whereby you can, every day in the week and three times every day, contribute just a little mite to this big game, and while you are doing it you can have the satisfaction of knowing. that you are not doing it selfishly, but * Stenographic report of an address delivered at Fifth Annual Convention of the League of Minnesota Municipalities, St. Cloud, October 17, 1917. that you really are contributing to some little fellow, somewhere, who needs the things that you are going to save. I say "going to save" because I know that every American citizen, when he understands the food proposition which is confronting the world at present, is going to do his little bit by changing his food habits-he is going to eat just a little differently than he has been in the habit of doing, and in that way he is going to contribute his mite to the cause. I was asked the other day to define the work of the Federal Food Administration in ten words. Of course I could not do that fully, but I made this reply, that, as I saw it, the work of the United States Food Administration is to make the world's food supply go around. Now I do not want to picture in your minds the idea that you are going to be asked to go hungry, or that anybody. in this country need go hungry, or that anybody in this world need go hungry, but there are certain things that we need to do. I feel certain that we have enough food in America today to feed two hundred million people instead of one hundred million people, if we would change our habits very slightly. So do not get scared about being hungry. I am not going to ask you to go hungry, or any of your folks to go hun gry. Food Production There are three angles of the Food administration work, and naturally the first one is the production of food. That seems to have been the chief business of Minnesota-to produce food. That is our biggest industry. It amounts to more than any other industry we are conducting in the state. We have produced this year sixty million bushels of wheat, more than four times as much as we could possibly use ourselves. We have produced more vegetables, more milk and butter and more meat than we can possibly use. So, it seems rather strange to come to a Minnesota audience with a plea to save these very things that we have here in abundance. But I am making the plea on behalf of peoples not so fortunate as we, who absolutely need these things if they are to be well fed or even reasonably well fed. I wish every man, woman, and child, in America, might meet Mr. Hoover, the head of the food work in the United States. I am satisfied that if you could meet him and just get an impression of the man and what he is attempting to do, and how he is attempting to do it, that there is not one loyal citizen who would refuse to carry out to the letter the wishes of Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover, as you know, is working for the United States and paying his own expenses, absolutely without taking one cent from the government. He has been set at a task that is not entirely a pleasant one. You know in European countries they call a man like that a food dictator, and that dictator says that each man may have so many pounds of this and SO many pounds of that, and he cannot get any more; but in America, where we have a democratic form of government, where people love to do things in their own way, we have a different proposition. It is a proposition of convincing every individual in America that he has a personal duty to perform in this matter of the use of food. Voluntary Methods Another phase of the food work that we have to contend with, that is probably the most trying one of all, is the matter of distribution. I think the distribution of food products has caused more uneasiness and more criticism of the people who have done it than any other line of work in America. You know it has become a common thing for people to criticise the middleman and call him all sorts of uncomplimentary names. It is one of the duties of the Food Administration to satisfy both producers and consumers that the middleman has a real function to perform. I wish you could all get clearly Mr. Hoover's impression of the regulation of the distribution of products. His idea is absolutely a democratic one. He does not want to lay down hard and fast rules to be followed by anyone, but he hopes to accomplish the effective and efficient distribution of food products merely by enlisting the cooperation of the people whose business it is and has been to distribute these products. He has confidence enough in human nature-and so have I-to believe that in this trying time the great majority of men engaged in any industry in the United States are willing to do their mite, and do it just as efficiently as they know how. He hopes to bring about a better and more. effective system of distribution, by calling into conference some of the |