554 PARKS 



tive officer. In the stage of park development in this country when the 

 chief executive officer was primarily a horticulturist and perhaps presumed 

 not to be well trained in business and social service organization and man- 

 agement, there may have been some vital reason for making the secretary 

 wholly independent of the chief executive. But with the type of chief 

 executive or superintendent which a modern park department demands, 

 this plan of divorcing the office division from the control of the chief execu- 

 tive is contrary to the principles of efficient business organization and 

 management. Not infrequently points of friction have arisen between the 

 secretary and the chief executive under the divided plan. The secretary, 

 because of his intimate knowledge of the records of the department and 

 his close personal contact with the members of the board, can easily create 

 situations very irksome to the chief executive. The secretary, if long con- 

 tinued in office, will likely tend gradually to assume a kind of proprietary 

 right in managing certain phases of or even all the affairs of the depart- 

 ment a right which properly belongs to the chief executive. The chief 

 executive or superintendent should be chief executive in fact over all divi- 

 sions of the department. This should be adopted as a vital principle of 

 efficient business organization in all park and recreation departments. 



In modern movements toward concentration of power in municipal 

 governments represented by the city manager, commission and Federal 

 plans of municipal government, there has been, curiously enough, a decen- 

 tralization of responsibility that organically belongs in different departments 

 of the city government. Thus the purchasing department makes purchases 

 for all city departments; the city attorney acts as adviser for all depart- 

 ments; the treasurer keeps all finance records; the city engineer performs 

 the duties of an engineer for all departments, and the city clerk keeps the 

 records for different departments, etc. With reference to park and recrea- 

 tion departments under such systems of city government, record keeping, 

 instead of being an organic function of the chief executive officer with a 

 clerical force under and directly responsible to him, has been split up among 

 several different departments of the city government. This plan is perhaps 

 commendable from the standpoint of economy, but it is likely to result in 

 the department not having collected and organized in a thorough and com- 

 prehensive manner those records that it should have in its own possession 

 and with which it should be very familiar. 



In very small departments where the budget is only a few hundred 

 or a few thousand dollars and the scope of activities limited, this plan is 

 perhaps the only practical method of handling record keeping as well as 

 performing general and specific executive functions. But as soon as any park 

 and recreation department begins to utilize an operation budget of, say, 



