Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1903 — Proposed Fees and Salaries. [ARTICLE]

Proposed Fees and Salaries.

Senator Gard, author of the fee and salary bill now pending in the; Legislature, and altogether likely to beoome law, has prepared a list of the present salaries of all the oounty officers which it affects, and of what they will be, as near as they can be figured, under his bill. These present and prospective official salaries in Jasper county are as follows: Olerk, present salary, $1,500, Gard bill, SI,BOO, Sheriff, present salary, 1T,400 Gard bill, $1,600. Auditor, present salary, $1,700, Gard bill, $2,000. ' Recorder, present salary, $l,lOO, Gard bill. $2,15b. Treasurer, present salary $1,200, Gard bill, $1,500. The figures for Reoorder are both erronious. His present salary is $1,700, and under the Gard bill will be about $1,900. The above “present salary” of auditors does not include the amount they now receive as clerk of oounty council. The sheriffs uhder the Gard bill will be allowed, in addition to the above, their foreign fees and for boarding prisoners. The treasurers’ fee for collecting delinquent taxes are not inoluded under either the present law or the Gard bill. The bill is perhaps as near equitable' as can be devised, yet in many-oases it does not pay salaries in proportion to the work done. Thus, for instanoe, the Reoorder of Vanderburg oounty, a populous but old settled county where the buying and selling of real-estate prooeeds slowly, the Recorder only does about half as muoh work as the Reoorder of Jasper oounty, yet the Vanderburg man will get $4,300 per year to $1,900 for the Jasper county offloial. More than twice the work at less than half the salary is the way it will work out in that case. That there are hundreds of other oases, the state over, about as inequitable, there is but little doubt. In fact, the bill is largely on the. wrong principle. It bases salaries too muoh on population and not jpnough on the amount of work required. Another way inwbioh the bill would have been more equitable, wduld have been to have continued the sliding soale on As the law now Ik, it reduces the rate per 1,000 above 10,000, It Should have reduced it for population, in excess -of 20,000 and again in exoees 'of 30,000. As it is many- officers in oonntiee of large population get enormous salaries, for doing but little more work than the officers in other owintlea-of smaller population, for half, pr Jess tlian half the pay.