Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 187, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1915 — UTILITIES DECISION ON L & N. W. CASE [ARTICLE]

UTILITIES DECISION ON L & N. W. CASE

Complaint Made Against Projected Interurban Was Dismissed—Next Move Uncertain. Indianapolis News. Persons at Lafayette have been notified that the public service com- [ mission has dismissed a complaint against the projected Lafayette & Northwestern railroad, which, it was alleged at a recent trial, had been selling stock without approval from the commission. Henry W. Marshall, a Lafayette publisher and traction line owner, was the complainant. At a hearing recently before members of the public service commission, Mr. Marshall testified under bath that the territory to be traversed by the line did not have one-half enough population to uphold successfully the line. He also sought to prove the promoters of the line were fleecing farmers and that the entire scheme was a stock-jobbing plan. The promoters of the railroad said they had sold stock only in a construction company to build the road, but said the stockholders in the construction company eventually were to be the stockholders in the traction line. At the hearing questions by commissioners brought out that the construction company scheme was merely a plan of evading the Indiana law’s provisions for commission approval of stock and bond issues. The defendants finally “threw themselves on the mercy of the court,” according to Charles A. Edwards, a commissioner who sat at the hearing, and the reported decision of the commission dismissing the case came as a distinct surprise. No announcement of the decision was made at the office of the secretary of the commission. Under the utility law commissioners claim the right to keep decisions they do not wish the public to 1 hear about, secret for a period of several months and after that time the decisions are so thoroughly hidden in the mass of reports at the secretary’s office that it is hard to find them. The decision of the commission, it is believed at Lafayette, will permit the plans of the promoters to be car- ■ ried on toward the completion of the 1 road.