Lack of Public Toilets Downtown a Problem : Council Panel Gets Lesson on Restrooms

What accepts coins, keeps itself clean and plays music to tell you when to leave?

No, it’s not some version of the jukebox. Rather, it’s the new public toilet the City of San Diego is considering installing on downtown streets.

“I understand it plays music and if you’re not out of there, the doors fly open and you’re in trouble,” explained Patricia Tennyson, consultant to the city’s Public Facilities and Recreation Committee, which heard a presentation Wednesday on the unusual “self-sanitizing” toilet.

At $10,000 per toilet per year, plus a $3,000 installation charge, this unisex model from France sounded a little pricey to the committee. But, though committee members declined, for now, to order any of them, they didn’t rule out the idea.

They asked their staff to compare the price of the musical restrooms to more conventional models. And in a related action, they selected a site for the city’s next public toilet--on C Street next to the loading dock of the Civic Theatre.

Public toilets are not the most popular item on the City Council’s agenda. But ever since last March, when underground restrooms at Horton Plaza were closed, city officials have known there was an “urgent” need for new ones.

The plaza toilets were poorly maintained, unsafe, and they had become a refuge for transients, noted Kathy Kalland, a spokeswoman for the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s downtown redevelopment agency.

Last year, during a workshop by architect Lawrence Halprin on what to do with the plaza, 100 “pristine, well-dressed” people had toured Horton Plaza’s latrines at 10 p.m.

“It was interesting,” Kalland said, choosing her words carefully. “People were sleeping in the restrooms. The place was in disrepair. Five of the toilets had no doors on the stalls, and one man was permanently perched on the latrine. Permanently--because people in other tours mentioned him too.”

The toilets were demolished in part because of their condition and also because NuHahn Inc., the contractor for the new Horton Plaza Shopping Center, needed to run an underground waterline through the site.

Four portable toilets were left at the plaza, which serves as a major transfer point on city bus routes as well as a hangout for derelicts.

City and business leaders want the portable toilets removed and permanent ones installed--but away from the plaza, perhaps located instead at City Hall and staffed with full-time attendants.

“Restrooms in the downtown area are both necessary an essential for tourism business, growth, area residents and non-residents including the homeless,” a Feb. 4 CCDC report on public bathrooms said.

If new toilets were placed on a well-traveled route--in public view--they would be safer, Kalland suggested, “and perhaps that stigma (of a public toilet as a gathering place for street people) will be lost.”

But any new restrooms must have attendants if a broad section of the public is going to use them, Art Skolnik, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Assn, said following the meeting.

“If they’re left unattended, they’re subject to vandalism and the possibility of undesireable activity--drug dealing, sexual activity . . . If you want only street people to use them, I guess you don’t need them (attendants),” Skolnik said.

The council committee asked its staff to consider the need for full-time attendants. (The CCDC report on restrooms suggested that employing bathroom attendants from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. would cost the city $32,000 a year.)

The committee also asked CCDC to look at other downtown locations for public restrooms, including at trolley stops and in the Gaslamp Quarter.

A CCDC report on public restrooms near Horton Plaza listed 12 public or “semipublic” restrooms downtown--at the Santa Fe railroad depot or local bus stations and in county and state-owned buildings.

But at six of those, entry is restricted. Some have locked doors, others (the “public” bathroom at the San Diego Police Station, for instance) require people to get permission before they can use them.

City Councilman Ed Struiksma asked Gerald Trimble, CCDC’s executive director, to try to persuade private developers to install public bathrooms in their buildings.

“We can attempt it,” Trimble said dubiously.

Struiksma conceded that the city is in a poor position to persuade the private sector to add public restrooms. “We don’t even have restrooms on the ground floor of this building (City Hall) except under lock and key,” he noted.

Providing public restrooms is “a responsibility to be met, as unpleasant as it might be,” Struiksma said, adding, “But it’s even more unpleasant when it’s not met. “

In the absence of public bathrooms, some transients have been using city planter boxes and the streets, several city officials said.