Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

In a blatant attempt to circumvent civil service rules, the Spokane City Commission passed a new ordinance allowing the head of each department to cut the pay of city employees. Instead of fixing pay rates for each of the city’s 200 employees, the new ordinance set only a maximum salary, allowing supervisors to pay workers anything up to that maximum.

Mayor W.J. Hindley said, “The commissioners believe that the new ordinance will remove the hamper of the civil service rules and allow us to act in disciplining employees in cases where we perhaps could not file charges which could be proved. As the commissions now have power to cut salaries, employees will have to do good work or suffer.”

City workers, however, worried that the ordinance “has deprived them of the security and protection against political moves they have felt they have had since the new (city) charter brought in civil service,” the Daily Chronicle reported. They also feared the ordinance had the effect of nullifying the city’s civil service.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1961: President John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” (That goal was accomplished eight years later.)