Assuming a 40-hour week, 50 working weeks per year, the total of direct and indirect labor involved would employ approximately 50,000 men for 6 years. Mr. ROWAN. Mr. Kincaid will be here for several days, Mr. Chairman, and will be available. He is the executive director of the Chicago Plan Commission. The CHAIRMAN. Very well. The committee will now stand adjourned until 10:30 o'clock tomorrow morning. (At 12:10 p. m., an adjournment was taken until Wednesday, February 9, 1944, at 10:30 a. m.) POST-WAR POLICY WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1944 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS, Washington, D. C. The committee met at 10 a. m., pursuant to adjournment, in caucus room, House Office Building, Hon. Carter Manasco presiding. Mr. MANASCo. The committee will come to order. We shall continue the taking of testimony on matters relating to post-war policy. The chairman has asked me to place in the record a letter from the Honorable Eugene Worley, a Member of the House from the Eighteenth District of Texas, with which was enclosed a letter from Mr. A. A. Meredith, city manager of the city of Borger, Tex. The letter and the statement will be placed in the record at this point. (The letter and the statement referred to are as follows:)" Hon. FRITZ G. LANHAM, Chairman, Public Buildings and Grounds Committee, FEBRUARY 1, 1944. House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. DEAR FRITZ: Enclosed is a letter I have received from Mr. A. A. Meredith, city manager, of Borger, Tex., relative to Federal aid to political subdivisions for planning post-war employment. Mr. Meredith had many years of experience as a district administrator of the Work Projects Administration in Texas and I know of no one who is better qualified to speak on this subject nor anyone who has a more pratical approach to it. I have confidence in his views and any statements that he might make on this subject, and I would greatly appreciate your bringing this letter to the attention of your committee and also including it in the printed hearings if you feel this is proper. Any information or comment you may care to give me relative to this and which I may pass on to Mr. Meredith will likewise be appreciated. Sincerely yours, GENE. CITY OF BORGER, TEX., Re Federal aid to political subdivisions for planning post-war employment. Member of Congress, House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. MY DEAR CONGRESSMAN: From our past experience, we know that planning post-war employment within local communities of the States will exceed the importance of big-job planning on a Federal level. We could not build a sound economy for our Nation by further permanent concentration of our population in the greater metropolitan areas. Our record of Federal grants to the overpopulated areas to care for their unemployed in the past stands as reliable testimony to this fact. States, counties, or small cities cannot be expected to exert their utmost effort in planning post-war employment if publicised projected major Federal works encourages their belief the unemployed can remain the responsibility of the Federal Government after the war. We must have locally planned work projects that will result in capital and social gains to our local communities to bring about a willful exertion on their part necessary to relieve the burden on our Federal Government of doing all the planning that is now believed advisable to insure full employment. We must remember there are great war industries newly built at strategic points throughout the country to serve our war needs, with vastly enlarged communities of people wholly dependent upon the war manufacturing that will cease when the war is ended. We must not expect the majority of these folk to continue their employment in these plants after conversion to peacetime manufacturing. These people are not native to the communities they have adopted for war work. They were recruited from every city, town, and village in the continental United States. Their immediate kin and all the ties of their home community life is back there from where they came. They are going back home when this conflict is over. As mass employment ends in the presently concentrated areas, we will find unemployment again increasing in the smaller communities throughout the country. Planning employment for the workers of our Nation on a community level will not only eventually lighten the burden of Federal financing, it will be in the best interest of our national economy. Our past experience has proven it is much easier to accomplish rehabilitation of unemployed people in their home community environment. This is easy to understand, for there are more people interested in their personal well-being, and it naturally results that there are greater opportunities for them to become self-supporting. Not many of our smaller cities, towns, and communities in this section of the country are able to make a cash investment necessary to obtain engineering and architectural plans on needed public work. The progressive increase in the cost of operation has more than offset the increase in tax payments in the majority of cases, and there is the lingering burden of debt accumulated over a period of years that is preventing the building up of reserve funds. On the other hand, there is no unemployment at the present time to urge such expenditures. The people have gone to the armed services and to war manufacturing centers. Our businessmen are without help and are working long hours to keep their business going. Under the stress and strain of uncertainties, conflicting reports and philosophies, it is most difficult to get our people at home organized and willing to take on the additional burden and cost of planning for post-war employment, especially when the expense of plans would require the issuance of deficiency warrants, as in the case of the city of Borger, Tex. The conditions that we are reciting will not likely be improved until the Congress has taken the necessary steps to encourage and induce the smaller cities and communities to begin the active work of planning. A thorough job will not be done without some commitment on the part of our Federal Government, either by matching funds spent by local communities in the planning of postwar work projects, or making available Federal funds to pay the cost of such planning, which might well be conditioned upon the full completion of the plans within a limited time consistent with the availability of professional services, and certification as to the adequacy of the plans by the Federal Works Agency, or some Federal agency with a staff of engineers capable of inspecting the plans. There will likely be arguments against the expenditure of Federal funds for planning public works within the jurisdiction of political subdivisions, the execution of which the Federal Government may not feel it would be in position to enforce; nevertheless, the over-all cost of planning public works on a Federal level to insure the Nation against unemployment would approximate the cost of local planning. If the restrictions governing local planning financed by Federal funds require that such planning be done only on needed public facilities, as approved by the agency having the responsibility of the final approval of the completed plans, there would be only a negligible number of failures to occur. The other course open in this direction, would be in the allocation of Federal funds equal to the cost of planning, to be paid out only upon completion of the work so planned, with adequate restrictions as to prior approval by Federal authority-but this would place the burden of providing the out-of-pocket cash upon the community requiring the plans. Deficiency warrants to pay the cost of planning, usually taken at a discount, would result in increased cost of the planning. This plan would not likely produce a thorough job of planning over the country. We know that orderly planning of future public work now is necessary if we are to avoid a repetition of the ridiculous stigma forced upon millions of our good citizens in 1933, including 120,000 Texans, who were ordered to report to work one day, bringing with them their garden rakes, spades, hoes, or whatever they had to work with. They raked leaves. What else could they have done? There were no plans by which they could build things worth while. There was no organization to see that their labor would result in lasting public benefits. My recommendation of community planned and executed work projects is based upon the knowledge that I gained during the 71⁄2 years I served as district director of the Federal work program in the Panhandle of Texas, and as relief administrator during the Emergency Relief Act program prior to the beginning of the work program in 1935. We had some strictly Federal work projects not shared by the counties and cities, as you will remember, in our lake program scattered over the 26 counties of the Texas Panhandle. It was not possible to locate these projects so that all the labor needed for the construction work could be obtained within the county of their location. It was necessary to transport labor a considerable distance, and there was a considerable loss in man-hours of labor by the required travel to and from the projects. In the case of the Work Projects Administration labor used on the Conchas Dam on the Canadian River in New Mexico where there were approximately 1,800 men from the Texas Panhandle area employed at a time, it was necessary that the men leave their families and use the boarding camp at the project. The majority of them sent very little of their earnings back to their families, leaving local communities to provide the necessities of life for their families, aside from the limited food and clothing available from Federal commodities. There were many other projects in our experience like this one. There were so many of the strictly Federal jobs of the past that required an enormous outlay of money for machinery and, when considered from the standpoint of man-hours of work required, did not compare favorably with local community projects, neither could it be truthfully said that the public benefits derived from such projects could equal the school buildings, paved streets, sidewalks, and the multitude of others like them. Public-work programs sponsored by our National Government for aid to the unemployed can wisely defer the choice of work projects to the States and the political subdivisions of the States. If largely confined to this policy, local autonomy will be encouraged, reasonable demands for cost-sharing will be met and the stimulus thereby given to domestic commerce will be uniform over the whole country. From my experience with and observation of the temperament of our people, I can assure you that no agency or group of agencies that might be set up within our Federal Government could satisfactorily select the work program projects without interested participation and direction by the communities to be served. Master highways across the country are fine and we need them. Great dams for irrigation and reclamation of our lands are also fine things for the Nation, but most of this work must be done by machinery and the man-hours of labor used per dollar spent dwindles into insignificance compared to a rock-masonry building or the multiplicity of other public works to supply the present needs of our local communities. We hope that the Members of the Congress upon whom will rest the responsibility of directing our Government's participation in the all-important job of planning for post-war employment may be impressed with the necessity of requiring public works planning in the communities. Sincerely yours, A. A. MEREDITH, City Manager. STATEMENT OF ALFRED BETTMAN, CHAIRMAN, CITY PLANNING COMMISSION, CINCINNATI, OHIO Mr. MANASCO. We have before us this morning Mr. Alfred Bettman, chairman of the City Planning Commission of Cincinnati, Ohio. You may proceed, Mr. Bettman. Mr. BETTMAN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen: The subject which I am happy to talk about is known as urban redevelopment, about which you have no doubt heard from other witnesses, namely, the rebuilding of blighted city areas which are not rebuilding themselves; of urban city districts which are a tremendous financial and 96548-44-No. 2- -33 |