(Credit: flickr photo by Bart Everson, used with permission)
Portable toilets.
Saratoga Springs may put portable toilets in the Woodlawn Avenue garage; they may open the Congress Park bathrooms 24/7, or they may do something completely different to offer homeless people what Commissioner of Public Safety James Montagnino called a “modicum of dignity.”
The issue is that the Code Blue Shelter that gives homeless people a place to sleep and use bathroom facilities in the coldest months of the year will close for the season soon. Montagnino proposed putting two portable toilets in the Woodlawn Avenue garage while the city deals with the homeless situation more fully. One of the toilets would be accessible to people with handicaps.
"When the temperature rises, there will be no shelter for the homeless for the foreseeable future," Montagnino said while introducing the first item on his agenda. After that, the homeless will have no place at night to use the facilities when other public restrooms have closed.
Montagnino said it would cost a little less than $1,000 a month for installation and maintenance.
No one on the city council would second his motion to open a public hearing on the issue.
The only support he found at the city council meeting Tuesday evening March 7 was from Sherie Grinter, a housing advocate and member of the mayor’s task force on homelessness which started meeting last week.
Speaking during public comment, she gave the idea "two thumbs up."
[See our coverage of homelessness task force meeting here.]
As soon as he proposed the idea, Montagnino faced problems from Mayor Ron Kim and the three other board members.
Kim fought against the move because he has already set up a task force that is considering the city's options to create a permanent shelter. He created the task force after a low-barrier shelter proposed for property on Williams Street fell through.
That proposal would have converted the former Senior Center, a building the city owns, into a shelter.
Parents at the Saratoga Central Catholic School pushed back against a low-barrier shelter next door to the school’s playing fields, and Shelters of Saratoga, which runs the Code Blue shelter, backed out of the plan to develop the Williams Street site with the city.
During the meeting Tuesday, Montagnino accused Kim of “caving” to the parents at the school by not pursuing the shelter at the Williams Street location.
Kim faulted Shelters for pulling out too soon and said he had met with the parents of the school, telling them that “Williams Street is still on the table."
He added that the task force he created has three main goals: to figure out what the city needs in a permanent shelter, what and where the facility should be and, most importantly he said, who will provide the service presumably now that Shelters has pulled out.
[Read about the plan here. Read Shelter’s statement here.]
Kim also indicated that the city never has had a full-time shelter, so the trouble here is not new.
When Commissioner of Finance Minita Sanghvi suggested the task force could look at options for overnight toilets, such as keeping the public restrooms in Congress Park open all night, the mayor pushed back saying the task force had enough on its agenda.
“This is a crisis,” Montagnino said of the homeless situation and the fact that no shelter will be available.
The council largely agreed that something had to be done, but they still saw other troubles. Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran said that a similar attempt was made in the past, and it failed miserably with misuse and property destruction. He assailed Montagnino for not doing enough research.
Montagnino shot back that he had conducted research and believed they could learn from the past and do better.
But the problems did not end there. The agenda said “discussion and vote" on the issue, but there was no attached resolution, so there was nothing to vote on, and without documentation, there was nothing really to discuss, they said.
Sanghvi brought up the question of money and how the portable toilets would be monitored. Even with a high-resolution camera installed outside the toilets, someone would have to monitor the video feed. Or someone would have to patrol the toilets.
“Are we going to have potty police?” she wondered. “Is that going to be someone’s role?" If so, the city would have to pay for that somehow, she said.
Montagnino then suggested moving the discussion to public hearing instead of a discussion and vote.
Commissioner of Public Works Jason Golub balked at that given the lack of documentation.
“I think we have the same problem doing this as a public hearing,” as compared to city council discussion, he said. “We need to provide more research of what the public is actually giving its input on.”
Despite this, Montagnino formally proposed that a public hearing on the various options be held. He included Sanghvi's suggestion that the public restrooms in Congress Park could remain open.
“Are we going to move forward with something?” Montagnino, clearly frustrated, asked. “Commissioner Sanghvi has an excellent suggestion. We have public restrooms in the park, why can’t we just have them open 24/7? These are things to discuss. We have the capacity to deal with emergencies immediately, not to continually kick the can down the road.”
The mayor was still not convinced.
“If you want to come back with a true proposal,” for the council, they could take it up then, the mayor said, adding that there was some time left to propose something since the Code Blue shelter is still open.
The measure failed when none on the council seconded the motion.