Many environmental and regulatory trends in general have their genesis in the state of California, and that might be the case with a new proposal in San Diego that could have an impact on the portable sanitation industry.

Officials are proposing to reverse a 50-year-old rule that bans charging a fee to use a public restroom. In a recent story from www.cbs8.com, San Diego’s city council president said money raised for public restroom usage — say $0.25 per entry — could be used to improve restroom infrastructure in the underserved downtown area and beyond. Sunny San Diego, with a population of about 1.4 million, apparently only has two public bathrooms in the downtown area.

“The goal is to increase access to public restrooms and the charge would cover the costs to install additional restrooms,” Sean Elo-Rivera, the council president, told a television news outlet. “It’s about establishing a network, the need is more established downtown, but not exclusively just in that area.”

It seems that Elo-Rivera is thinking about adding more brick-and-mortar bathrooms, but the idea of pay toilets could have a positive impact on portable sanitation in the city as well.

First off, the fees raised at the public bathrooms could be used to support strategic placement of portable restrooms on ocean piers, busy downtown streets, parks or even homeless encampments. Many California cities including San Diego, have large transient homeless populations because of the beautiful weather 365 days of the year.

And second, if paying for use of public bathrooms gains widespread acceptance, it’s possible PROs could begin to charge small fees. That could go for standard units or restroom or shower trailers finding many new applications in urban settings. This could be a revenue stream for PROs, or fees could be an incentive for cities to lease more portable sanitation products and make them self-sufficient.

A HEALTH ISSUE

Too often we see that municipal customers are looking to cut their budgets for portable sanitation, which flies in the face of growing demand for these services. Consider another recent story out of San Diego, which addressed a spike in hepatitis A cases that are traced to inadequate numbers of portable restrooms and hand-wash stations.

According to a report from www.thevoiceofsandiego.org, the city is planning to add restrooms in targeted areas in an effort to contain the illness spread by person-to-person contact with fecal matter. A local public health official, Dr. Ankita Kadakia, noted in a letter to the city that a hepatitis outbreak in 2017 resulted in 600 cases and 20 deaths, the majority of them among the homeless population.

“We know that adequate sanitation and access to restrooms and handwashing stations, in combination with homeless outreach efforts, is vitally important. Enhanced sanitation and education will minimize transmission and reduce the chance for an outbreak,” Kadakia wrote.

San Diego has not met Mayor Todd Gloria’s 2021 goal to have a restroom that could be reached within a 5-minute walk from any location downtown. The city has, however, stepped up its service of portable restrooms to create more sanitary conditions. All units are serviced at least three times a day, according to a spokesperson. And like other cities have started to do, San Diego now routinely sanitizes sidewalks that could be littered with human waste.

Local municipal budgets are constantly squeezed in an effort to control property taxes and provide adequate services at a time when infrastructure improvements have long been pushed off to the future. The potholes that bounce your cars and trucks around on city streets are the only reminder you need of how tight funds are. Faced with so little money and so many desperately needed projects, I argue that most cities will not see major spending on permanent bathroom facilities.

This is where portable sanitation can offer a smart solution to fill in the restroom gaps. PROs offer a great value to these strapped cities. You can place restrooms where they are needed most, move them quickly as the demand changes, and service them more efficiently than city workers could clean permanent bathrooms. And the cost differential between deploying several portable restrooms and building one permanent facility would be thousands compared to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

COST OF DOING BUSINESS

So that brings us back to the pay-to-poop concept. There are many examples where people are willing to pay for needed services. When truckers park at a truck stop, they pay a fee to take a shower or wash their clothes. When you head downtown for a concert or sports event, you don’t think twice about paying to park your car in a lot. Why do people expect taking advantage of a safe, clean place to relieve yourself should be any different?

Over the years I’ve seen PROs place shower trailers at big camping music events and hire attendants and charge a fee for a hot shower. And a few months ago I wrote about a New York contractor who took it upon himself to place units at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge for passersby to use. He didn’t charge, but accepted free-will donations to cover his costs. Who’s to say that the public wouldn’t welcome such a convenient service even if it came with a small cost?

I think officials in San Diego might be onto something. Time will tell if California reverses its free-restroom rule and the trend sweeps the nation.