Business owners frustrated over lack of facilities
By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press
DOWNTOWN — For city residents, tourists and transients alike, securing a clean restroom in the downtown area has long been one of the more agonizing of urban experiences.
Although City Hall has continued to work on a group of complex downtown development plans — including a $73.9 million library renovation, a $250 million plan to replace parking structures and add nearly 2,000 downtown parking spaces, and a plan to renovate the Santa Monica Place Mall — the restroom struggle doesn’t appear to be getting any easier.
In the past few years, a number of downtown retailers have increased limitations on bathroom usage. The ranks of aggravated shopkeepers include two major corporate chain branches that, contrary to their national policies, decided to shut down their restroom facilities to the public rather than cope with the constant abuse that amounted to both a health concern and a safety hazard.
Although the city operates nine public restroom facilities in the downtown area, a number of shopkeepers around the Promenade expressed frustration with the city’s bathroom situation, which they said has left them constantly at odds with the transient population of about 2,000 with few places to go.
Maria Flores, the general manager at the La Salsa on the Promenade, said the restaurant has had to hold up more than its fair share of downtown bathroom users. She fingered transients as the most frequent abusers of La Salsa’s bathrooms, which require a coin to operate.
“It’s supposed to be customers only,” said Flores, who has the special coins to open the restroom door behind the cash register. “A lot of restaurants here don’t have them, like Jamba Juice, and they send them over here. It’s not fair to say no... We have a lot of problems with the homeless taking a shower, making a lot of mess. Because they don’t have any bathrooms on the Promenade. I waste a lot of money on towels, soap, you know, to clean it all up.”
Petter Wichman, a bar tender at Britannia Pub on Santa Monica Boulevard, said passing transients have done much worse than mess up the bar’s bathroom, which is for customers only.
Miriam Mack, the city’s manager of economic development, said the city has been searching for space for additional public restrooms in the downtown area, but that other issues, such as downtown parking, have remained higher on the city’s “to do” list.
Four of the six city-owned bathroom facilities off the Promenade were nearly closed in 2002 because they were seen as public health and safety hazards. The bathrooms, which are on the bottom floors of six of the city’s 1960s-era parking structures, are graffitied and often covered in wet toilet paper and litter.
“I know our city crews have a very tight schedule of maintaining the public structures that are off the alleys,” Mack said. “They work very hard and diligently to have a regular cleaning schedule, but I think unfortunately those restrooms are located in such a manner that they do not give people the perception of accessibility and safety.”
“It was really just a safety issue for the staff and customers just in terms of being able to use the bathroom safely,”
“We’ve had all kinds of problems (with the homeless population),”
“They’ll just be walking by and disturb customers eating outside, asking for money, or just take food off people’s plates. Now we just say, ‘No, no, get out’ before they even get close, and we look bad.” — said Padric Gibson, a sales manager at the Borders Books on the Promenade. Borders shut its bathrooms in April 2002, a year and a half before the Barnes and Noble on the Promenade chose to do the same. he said. he said
“Inappropriate occurrences were happening in the restrooms — drug use, people were having sex... It wasn’t safe to go in, and it wasn’t just limited to the homeless population,”
Three of the six parking garages containing restrooms will be demolished and rebuilt in the next few years as a part of the city’s downtown parking plan, Mack said. The city would look into adding more facilities in the garages, she said, and is currently putting together cost estimates for adding more bathrooms in one of the soon-to-be-demolished parking structures as a short-term solution to the problem.
The city looked into leasing properties on Santa Monica Boulevard to address restroom problems in the downtown area two years ago but chose not to pursue the properties. It also operates three public facilities in Palisades Park near the Promenade.
The caliber, quantity and accessibility of downtown bathrooms have received such low marks recently that the board of the Bayside District Corporation spent nearly 45 minutes at a recent meeting arguing over what could be done to keep bathrooms in the downtown area clean and accessible. Some officials at Bayside, which partners the city with private downtown business owners, reasoned that large businesses should be required to have open restrooms, while others argued that businesses should be able to make their decision from a business standpoint.
“The bathrooms that remain (after some are shut down) become truly overburdened, and they have to carry the weight for the whole Promenade, which means they get overused,” said Rob Rader, a Bayside board member who argued that the city should build more bathrooms downtown. “Then the city or the retailers want to shut them down, and then there are even fewer bathrooms. It’s like a bathroom domino effect. Then the bathrooms remaining are under pressure to close.”
A number of other cities experiencing bathroom shortages and abuse — including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle — have put in public pay toilets to try to keep restrooms from being magnets for homeless people, drug users and prostitutes. The toilets, based on European models, are in permanent metal shelters and have automatic cleaning mechanisms. They also have timers that open the doors after a predetermined period. However, problems have persisted in those communities.
Other cities with sizable homeless populations, such as Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, have not developed systems any more complicated than Santa Monica’s. Both cities have seen clean bathrooms become increasingly scarce in their most frequented areas.
Although Bayside board members and City Council members were firm in stating that something needs to be done to address the situation, they could not agree on what.
Rader suggested the city buy property to install more bathrooms downtown and get enough cash together to hire 24-hour bathroom attendants.
City Councilman Herb Katz, who was a Bayside board member a few years ago, agreed.
“The city should buy a piece of property or rent a piece of property and build a proper restroom facility on the Promenade so the public can use it,” he said. “Do it right. The city’s supposedly been looking for some facility like that, but nothing’s come of it. I think they should have done something about it a long time ago.
“When I was on Bayside, the city kept stalling it,” he added. “They kept stonewalling it. Because in a budget shortage like the one we’re in right now, it’s not a budget priority. It should be.”
City Councilman Ken Genser said members of the community would need to have patience.
“The Bayside District thinks this is a big problem, and members of the public find it as something that’s lacking,” he said. “So we need to do this, but the question is how we should go about it. Attempts have been made, and it’s hard to find the right piece of land. Land is very hard to find downtown. There are also other priorities we need to deal with.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 16, 2004. Read the original PDF.