Commissioner hopes to facilitate new downtown bathrooms

Troubled by a message from a constituent last month, City Commissioner Stan Zimmerman broached the topic of adding what he feels is a much-needed asset downtown: bathrooms. 

The constituent’s email pertained to the restrooms at Island Park, located next to O’Leary’s. The picture painted in the message is rough, as the resident recounted the experience of dealing with a facility covered in urine and feces.

Zimmerman said the state of the Island Park restrooms was unfortunate, but unsurprising considering the stock of restrooms in the downtown area. Publicly accessible bathrooms are also located at the downtown SCAT transfer station, city hall and the Selby Library.

“If you only have a couple and you’re swamped with visitors, as we have been for the past couple of months — we just need more of these kinds of facilities,” Zimmerman said. “It’s that simple.”

Zimmerman said the issue isn’t at the top of his agenda, but it’s on his list. He said he’d like to emulate a model used in Europe, where bathroom attendants monitor easily accessible public restrooms and users are charged a small fee for use of the facility. His priority is making the city more welcoming for visitors.

“As a public health issue, as a public hygiene issue — if we’re going to be a tourist destination, we have to make it easy to be a tourist,” Zimmerman said. “We don’t want them to go to a public restroom that is so revolting and disgusting that you’d just rather not be there.”

One downtown leader supporting Zimmerman’s proposal is Eileen Hampshire, owner of Art to Walk On and a member of the city’s Downtown Improvement District board. Hampshire advocated for the group to spend money on installing public restrooms — also similar to those used in Europe — in November. Although her pitch didn’t fully gain traction, Hampshire is still steadfast in her belief that downtown could benefit from bathrooms.

Hampshire has two reasons for holding that belief. First, she thinks that the lack of conveniently available public restrooms is lacking in dignity — both because visitors are unable to easily find facilities at their leisure and because homeless individuals are forced to go to the bathroom in public due to a lack of options.

Additionally, she says the onus for providing restrooms to downtown visitors currently falls to the merchants — a responsibility she isn’t interested in bearing. 

“I think it’s really unfair of the city to make the merchants do the public bathrooms,” Hampshire said. “When I signed up to do a store, I didn’t sign up to clean public toilets.”

Not all downtown merchants share that opinion, however. Ron Soto — owner of Soto’s Optical, chairman of the Sarasota Downtown Merchants Association and another DID board member — said that he doesn’t see the need for additional downtown restrooms.

In addition to the maintenance issues the new facilities create, Soto pointed to the existing bathrooms in the area as evidence that more weren’t necessary.

“As far as the merchants go, if you’re a client, you can use the restrooms in just about all of the merchants’ businesses,” Soto said. “As far as the public goes, we have several public restrooms downtown here.”