Should Prince George increase public bathroom access?

While City Council was agreed that more bathrooms is a good thing, how to go about it was a key focus. For example, Councillors Ron Pollilo and Kyle Sampson would like to see more bathrooms on trails and parks, and Sampson specifically raised some concerns about how the City spends its money.

“There are countless organizations, non government organizations, downtown, who are receiving a lot of public dollars. I think that should be looked into. What kind of dollars are they receiving to provide what kind of services? To me, if you’re providing services to those folks, that includes things like washroom facilities,” Sampson said.

Sampson continued by explaining he would rather see city priorities and money be used on addressing the root issue of homelessness. While he certainly is not against public bathrooms as a whole, he believes that the City should continue focusing on housing and other social supports. While this is supposed to be a provincial responsibility, Sampson says the City is continuing to advocate to the province to address these issues, while also continuing to work to get people safely off our streets.

“We’re investing, we’re building different housing complexes with the province. We need to keep that up to help solve the root cause. But just throwing cash away to open up some bathrooms or just give cash away to do this and that, that doesn’t solve the root problem,” he said.

This motion is about more than just providing bathrooms for the homeless population, it’s intended to help the entire community. Because of this, it also hopes to provide funding for a dedicated monitoring service for the Canada Games Plaza bathroom to reopen it, and to access it you would need to get a key from Tourism Prince George.

“Access to public washroom space is not only to support those currently un or underhoused but also to support families with young children, individuals with either visible or invisible medical conditions and those who drink too many coffees on their trip to the Farmer’s Market,” the motion reads.

Councillor Brian Skakun, like Sampson, is also in support of more public bathrooms, but raised other concerns on the implementation. His primary concern is how the rollout of the Canada Games Plaza bathroom reopening would work, especially considering what happened when it initially opened years ago.

“They basically just got destroyed. People started coming down that area more. They burned the benches in the area, and then some of the folks that were using the bathrooms ended up spending more time in the library, and it just brought more people in the area that shouldn’t have been there to start with,” Skakun said.

While several councillors agreed these concerns were valid, the issue of public bathroom access remains a big one. The motion says a study showed that 1 in 5 people don’t go out as much as they would like due to a lack of bathrooms, so the motion hopes reopening the bathroom in a safe way could bring more people into the downtown core. However, the cost remains a concern.

“If we do have bathrooms downtown, who’s going to look after them? who’s going to pay the cost of having someone monitor those bathrooms?” Skakun said.

Council voted in favour of the motion to get more information from city administration, and this topic will continue to be discussed at a later council meeting.

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by Tommy Osborne

Should Prince George increase public bathroom access?

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