Model City

At first blush, it was hard to believe that there could be much wrong with life in Richland, Wash., the Atomic Energy Commission's model residential city for the big Hanford Plutonium Works. Its 24,000 residents seemed to live in an atomic-age Utopia. With no effort from them, Government planning had methodically channeled the city's burgeoning population into neatly curving rows of comfortable frame houses. Sputtering Government sprinklers had drawn green grass from the arid Columbia River basin in defiance of the gritty desert winds from the Horse Heaven Hills.

Government agents had kept watch on merchants' prices, had set rents at a modest $44 a month for a five-room house (including heat), had fended off crime, slums and commercialized sin. And Richlanders didn't even have any local taxes to pay: the Government made up the annual million-dollar deficit.

Richland's inhabitants, for the most part, seemed fairly satisfied with their lot. But the city's young Mayor David McDonald, an earnest, 34-year-old atomic chemist, missed the leavening of free enterprise. It was little things that set him thinking. Once he tried to stop some youngsters who were robbing his backyard peach tree, and got a sassy, truthful reply: "Our teacher says that everything in Richland belongs to the Government." A neighbor came home from work one evening to find his carefully nurtured flower bed torn up; that was where the Master Plan decreed that a Government tree should grow. After five months as head of Rich-land's frustrated, ineffectual city council, McDonald discovered that there was no government in Richland except the Atomic Energy Commission, and its contractor,, the General Electric Co. Late one night, Mayor McDonald labored over the manuscript of his first public speech, delivered it next day in a cold drizzle to 45 citizens and the American Legion band. Said he: "Our local government here is not a democracy. It could be called a benevolent dictatorship."

Thus emboldened, the council three weeks ago passed its first "ordinance," setting up the office of dogcatcher, requiring licenses for Richland dogs and specifying eight-foot leashes in public places. Nothing happened; the council was told that AEC lawyers would have to think it over. Last week, the Richland city council tried again. Angry over the way the Government was issuing rules about how householders should leave their garbage, the council decided to draft its ordinance No. 2, expressing its own ideas for garbage disposal in the model city. This time it was mad, and so were the townspeople who crowded its meeting. But whether they had any rights in the matter was still to be decided--by AEC's lawyers.

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