Sunday, Oct. 14, 1917
Republican mayoral candidate George T. Morris said yesterday that “the most incompetent branch of the city government is the Water Department, under the management of the foreign Superintendent of Water Works.”
By “foreign,” Morris means that John Diven is not a Troy native, but was “imported” from South Carolina by Mayor Cornelius F. Burns. Diven tells The Record today that Morris’s criticisms “are so much at variance with the facts that I do not feel I can in justice to myself and the Trojan public allow them to go uncorrected.”
Morris, a fiscal conservative, wrote that Diven makes more than twice as much money per year as his predecessor, the “highly efficient and native-born” Eugene S. Osborne. “Imported articles are more expensive than domestic made,” the Republican joked.
Diven explains that the difference in the city budget is not as great as Morris claims. Unlike Diven, Osborne had an assistant who made $1,500 a year. As for Obsborne’s reputed efficiency, Diven writes that “his efficiency is indicated by the [implicitly bad] condition in which the department was found at the beginning of the present administration.”
Morris claims that Diven put a “foreign corporation” to work repairing the Tomhannock reservoir spillway, which “leaks at convenient periods” for the superintendent and his “foreign” cronies.
“The Tomhannock spillway has never given trouble or leaked at convenient periods,” Diven answers, “There is no convenient period for such occurrences.” As for the repairs, they’re supervised by T. Joseph Kars and Michael H. Cavanaugh, “both residents of Troy.”
Morris claims that city water rates have been driven up in part by “the elaborate suite of rooms furnished to Mr. Diven, where he transacts not only the city’s business … but the business of the American Water Works Association.”
Diven explains that “The elaborate suite of rooms are the rooms that have always been used by the water department – not a dollar has been spent on them. The only piece of property in the office occupied by me that belongs to the city is one rolltop desk.”
The American Water Works Association, of which Diven is secretary – and which gives an annual award in his name to the present day – “is not a private business, but one conducted for the benefit of water works generally,” the superintendent clarifies.
Morris drastically overestimated Diven’s income as AWWA secretary. “My salary from this source is not $1,800 a year, but $300 – an amount barely sufficient to pay the expenses of attending meetings and conventions,” Diven writes. Some of that money goes to Diven’s assistant secretary, who doubles as stenographer for the Troy water works.