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The public's right to go is an issue for us all
© St. Petersburg Times, Ever take a long walk along Florida's east coast beaches near Cocoa? You'll see thousands of swimmers, miles of now-condo-infested beach, occasional restaurants and bars with "customers only" signs. And no bathrooms. We are, I guess, to assume that any time any of those thousands of beach buffs, especially after nine or 10 beers, experiences a call of nature, he or she gets out of the water, puts on shoes and a shirt and goes into a restaurant and buys something in order to use the facilities, or failing that, drives home, goes to the bathroom and then returns to the beach. Yeah, right. It's a miracle red tide isn't orange. Admit it, people are violating state and federal regulations about discharging untreated wastewater (and, one hopes, only that) into the ocean. A few rare locations, Fort Lauderdale's South Beach Park being one of them, actually offered public restrooms, at least until recently. But the restrooms there fell into such disrepair that they have been closed, and new ones won't be open until January. This, clearly, ladies and gentleman, is a call for help from . . . Bathroom Man. Where is my cape when I really need it? As I have in Dade City, St. Augustine and Ybor City -- all places (except, now, for Dade City) where you will see stressed, rapidly walking, jittery people hoping they have enough change to buy a cup of coffee somewhere with a bathroom -- I am willing to step up to the wall, so to speak, for Fort Lauderdale. Beachgoers there now have a milelong strip with pay toilets at one end and portable toilets at the other. What are swimmers without correct change, or who don't want to spend time in a sun-heated, fiberglass booth full of human waste and not-quite-successful chemical deodorants, to do? And why doesn't anyone care? Keeping people out of business restrooms is actually an international problem. I have seen signs, and sometimes overzealous attendants, in bathrooms in Mexico, Holland, France, Germany and Switzerland all devoted to making sure that only the "right people" get into the bathroom. I saw a near-fistfight once at a St. Petersburg nightspot over a street person's wanting to use a bathroom to which he had been denied admittance. The city of Amsterdam recently sidestepped the problem by legalizing public urination, which, like marijuana use, already was a tradition. Frankly, I don't think the United States is up to that sort of solution, although an interesting point came up two years ago when a Hernando County school bus driver got into trouble for, when he felt it was unavoidable, parking his bus, taking his keys and adjourning to some nearby woods to relieve himself. Hernando County Judge Peyton Hyslop has ruled more than once that urinating in public is not illegal unless it is done in a lewd and lascivious manner. I'd like to say that I don't know what that means, but I do, and that's another column for sometime before I retire . . . just before I retire probably. The Hernando driver, who had the sympathy of all men older than 50, got off with only a letter in his personnel file. I didn't read it, but I do not believe reports that it made him the county's No. 1 bus driver. By the way, things in Fort Lauderdale are even tougher north of South Beach, where the city is in its 12th year without public toilets on the beach there. Bunker-style, underground restrooms once offered relief near the beaches, the Associated Press says, but the city shut them down in 1989 because people were using them to have sex and do drugs. Hmm . . . two other areas in which the government thinks it should be exerting control. Bet that bogus $300 tax refund could have built a lot of toilets. Affordable public housing would give people a place to have sex in private, and realizing the war on drugs has as much chance of succeeding as prohibition (Otherwise, why do we have a 24-hour cartoon channel?) might free up our great governmental minds to deal with real problems. Until, then, I said it on the streets of Dade City, which now has bathrooms, and it can now echo to the Atlantic shore: Let my people go.
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Times columns today Jan Glidewell Gary Shelton From the Times North Suncoast desks |
