APPRAISERS.
The company may apply to the Court, or Judge, who most, "immediately upon such application, appoint three disinterested appraisers." Now, these appraisers are to assess the lands of a great number of persons; and are to be the sole judges of the amounts of the levies. In short, the people are absolutely at their mercy; and yet no notice whatever is to be given of the time and place, when and where the appointments are to be made, or applied for. When property is to be sold on execution, the law provides that the owner must be notified, and may choose one of the two men who are to appraise it. Not so here. The owner not only has no voice in selecting the men who are to appraise and assess his lands, but he must not even know when or where, or by whom the selectirn is to be made. The corporation who levies and collects, and uses the assessments has the whole matter in its own control.
But what are to be the necessary qualifications of these appraisers? Their duties are certainly important--their power for evil, should they be corrupt or ignorant, is certainly enormous.
Property levied upon by attachment must be appraised by the Sheriff, "with the assistance of a disinterested and credible householder of the county."
Property levied upon by execution must be appraised by "two disinterested householders of the neighborhood where the levy is made, one to be chosen by each of the parties." Why are not the same safeguards erected here, where the interests involved are almost incalculably greater than in the cases which I have mentioned?
page: 234[View Page 234]This law requires simply that the appraisers shall be "disinterested." The very thought of their being disinterested is annihilated instantly by the fact that they are to be employed and paid by the company for whose benefit the appraisements are to be made. They are not required to be credible citizens, nor householders, nor freeholders, nor residents of the county, nor even of the State. They have not the first single qualification of upright and impartial appraisers. They may be non residents of the State; they may be honest men, but totally ignorant of the lands they are to assess; they may be seedy vagabonds and professional dead beats, and, if I am not very seriously misinformed, this is the actual character of men who have appraised most of the lands in the Kankakee Valley.
These appraisers are not appointed in each county. Being appointed in one county, where part of the work lies, they make the appraisements in all the counties into which it extends. This is certainly wrong; for if the appraiser should be even an excellent judge of lands and values in the county where he resides, he might be no judge at all of different lands in a different and distant county.
Section nine requires that "Notice of the time and place when and where the appraisers will begin the examination of lands, and the assessments of benefits and injuries thereto" shall be given. No form of notice is prescribed, and no particular mode of publishing it is pointed out. The statute simply says: "It shall be sufficient it published three successive weeks in a newspaper in the county where the land is situate." It is at the option of the company to publish it in a newspaper or post it in the swamps.
The same section provides that "proof of the publication may be made by the affidavit of the editor of the newspaper, or of the secretary of the company." But this amounts to nothing, because there is no requirement that the proof is to be filed with, or made to any public officer. Nobody supervises or inspects it, and the company may give notice or not, just as they please, and nobody can object.
