A century ago, on Aug. 25, 1923, the Berkeley City Council approved Berkeley’s first annual budget under the new city manager form of government.

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City Manager John Edy presented a unified budget from his office, rather than the budget proposals that had come in previous years from individual council members who were in charge of managing different city departments.

When the council considered the budget there was “a large attendance at the meeting, but not one single word of criticism of the draft as originally presented by the city manager,” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported. “Edy appeared somewhat surprised that the budget seemed to meet with such unanimous approval.”

The budget set property tax rates for the fiscal year, based on each $100 of property valuation. The rates were 35 cents for grammar schools; 9 cents for the public library; 4 cents for “library building” (which appears to have been a fund for new library construction); 12 cents to service the debt on bonds; and $1 for “general” expenditures, which was presumably all other city expenses.

The council approved the budget but delayed action on a parallel recommendation from Edy for a new ordinance to reorganize city departments. Councilmember Samuel May asked for a one-week postponement so he could study the measure.

The next day (August 26) the paper had an article detailing the proposed changes. Among other things, Edy had proposed putting the department of public works under management of the city engineer and that the health department include the city veterinarian.

The revisions also gave the city manager authority to hire “stenographers, clerks, bookkeepers, field men, collectors, telephone operator, janitor, assistant janitor, gardeners, truck drivers, helpers, laborers, stokers, assistant stokers, watchmen, inspectors and such other special assistants as he may require.”

Weather records: The UC Berkeley campus had a weather station that officially recorded daily rainfall, temperatures, air pressure and similar measurements.

It had long been on Observatory Hill, where the Students’ Observatory stood on campus. On Aug. 27, 1923, the Gazette reported that it was being moved to a larger structure at a new location, a lawn southwest of the Campanile.

The station’s new location would include “maximum and minimum thermometers, dry and wet bulb thermometers’ rain gauge, a hydrograph and a thermograph. The wet bulb thermometer will later be superseded by a sling psychrometer,” the Gazette reported

Sale signage: Do readers remember my mention in a column earlier this year of the Berkeley Realty Board deciding to ban “for sale” signs from Berkeley properties?

“We all agreed that ‘for sale’ signs littered about on homes cheapened the city. We did not want to make it appear as though we were trying to sell all Berkeley,” James McCrosson, the Realty Board’s president, said Aug. 25, 1923.

However, McCrosson said that “private property owners and several contractors” had circumvented the ban and were putting up their own signs. Twenty-seven real estate businesses were objecting. They had voluntarily agreed not to put up signs advertising homes for sale, and they wanted others stopped.

The reader might ask, what would be the alternative in that era to physical “for sale” signs on properties for sale? I imagine the answer would be newspaper advertisements, and outreach by real estate sellers — that is, someone looking for a home might instead have to visit a real estate office and learn about what was for sale.

So there is perhaps a bit of self-interest here on the part of the protesting companies. It was presumably in their interests to channel buyers — either through newspaper ads or in-person consultation — into their own home sales network.

Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.