The following article appeared in the July 24 edition of the Guelph Tribune:
Council will decide Monday if it’s willing to change course and agree to have the city foot the bill for testing pissoirs to fight public urination in the downtown.
Council should reconsider its June 22 decision that downtown stakeholders, including the bars, should pay the whole cost of the pilot project, a council committee recommended this week.
If council agrees after all to foot most of the cost of a three-pronged campaign against public urination, two pissoirs would be placed on Macdonell Street in the heart of the bar district during September and October. They’d stay there around the clock during the two-month pilot project.
The pissoirs would be usable only by able-bodied men, not by women or the physically disabled. However, that’s acceptable in the short term to deal with a problem caused mostly by young men, says Coun. Ian Findlay.
Of the 342 tickets handed out by Guelph Police for public fouling since January 2007, 341 of the $240 tickets have gone to able-bodied young men, he said. The other went to a woman.
While pissoirs don’t deal with gender and accessibility issues, which must be addressed in the longer term, “it solves the biggest problem – young men peeing in the street,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
“If you have a problem with a mouse, you put out a mouse trap,” Findlay said.
The proposal that went to council on June 22 involved having city staff build an open-air urinal for the test using a flatbed trailer, which would have been wheeled into place only for weekend bar nights. Council agreed with the need for such a test, but it didn’t want the city to have to pay anything towards it.
The Downtown Nightlife Task Force, which was formed to try to solve the problems of the city’s entertainment district, then met July 8 and came up with a new proposal involving the sort of pissoirs already used in Edmonton and Victoria.
The task force countered council’s June 22 motion with a new proposal that the city pay $14,210 towards the cost of a three-pronged campaign against public urination, including a four-month test of pissoirs starting in September.
The task force, which includes representatives of bar owners and other groups, committed $4,200 towards the campaign. However, $3,500 of this would go towards a poster campaign in bar washrooms against public urination, which requires the costly creation of original artwork, Findlay said.
The third prong of the campaign would be stricter enforcement by Guelph Police of the city’s anti-fouling bylaw, also starting in September.
When the issue went July 20 to council’s emergency services, community services and operations committee, Findlay moved an amendment that the test of pissoirs last just two months, instead of four.
Stopping the pilot project at the end of October will reduce the cost to the city, he said. It also means council will be in a position to consider measures to deal with the public urination issue when it sets the city’s 2010 budget, he said.
Findlay said he didn’t have an estimate for what a two-month pissoir test would cost the city, but more details should be ready for Monday’s council meeting.
“Council has received a lot of criticism about this initiative. A lot of people are upset about this . . . but what we are not hearing is solutions,” he said.
“There are problems with all the ideas we have” to address the problem of public urination, Findlay said.
Pissoirs, which have privacy screening but aren’t fully enclosed, get around concerns that police have about public safety and “nefarious activity” in fully enclosed public toilets, he said. However, they aren’t designed for women and aren’t accessible to the disabled.
On the other hand, the city might have to consider posting security personnel near any fully enclosed washrooms it puts in the downtown, be they freestanding units on the street or washrooms in new public buildings, Findlay said. The city has plans to put public washrooms in the new Wilson Street parkade, in a new transit hub on Carden Street and in a new main library, but it will have to decide what hours they’ll be open and how to deal with security issues, he said.
“The public washrooms have to be safe and healthy and respectful places for people to use at all times of day,” so there may be a need for security staff to be on hand, Findlay said.