Report Recommends Removal of Seattle’s Automatic Public Toilets

Replacing Controversial Automatic Units Will Save City $4.5 million Over 5 Years

SEATTLE — A new report on Seattle’s five automatic public toilets (APTs) recommends the City cancel its contract for the controversial devices by early next year and use the savings to provide a more practical range of public sanitary services.

In 2001, overriding a mayoral veto, the Seattle City Council directed Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) to contract for the lease, installation, and maintenance of five APTs to meet the need for increased access to public toilets in Seattle’s downtown and urban centers. The high-tech self-cleaning units, which went into service in 2004, were intended as an attractive, “step up” from the handful of traditional portable public toilets they would replace.

Last year, as evidence mounted that the German-made Hering-Bau automatic toilets have become magnets for crime and are not a cost-effective solution to the lack of public restroom facilities, the Council directed SPU to prepare a report evaluating the APT program.

The just-completed report says that although the toilets have been well used they are also unattended — which has allowed drug use and dealing, alcohol use and prostitution to occur inside of them. Without constant monitoring, the City has been unable to control these negative behaviors, which has had the result of causing many homeless people to stay away from the APTs, thus further diminishing their value to the public.

Opting out of the APT contract now, the report says, will save the City an estimated $4.5 million over a five-year period. The report says SPU is confident that by removing the automatic toilets and replacing them with access to toilet facilities in nearby buildings, “we can meet our common goal of providing public toilet access to Seattle residents while also eliminating the negative behaviors that we are seeing in the automatic public toilets.”

Further proposed solutions to the public toilet problem include:

Using APT program savings to provide attendants and monitoring for those facilities with public restroom agreements.

Alley improvement partnerships in high defecation areas.

Signs and maps to public toilets.

Public toilet issues, the report notes, have been a chronic problem in Seattle for well over 100 years; and their history (see attachment) “suggests that these challenges: a) are cyclical in nature whereby proposed public toilet solutions (install, charge for, lockdown, or close a toilet) and the emerging problems (vandalism, public defecation, crime, complaints) have repeated themselves over and over again; and b) encompass social issues (homelessness, drug and alcohol use, prostitution) that will not generally be solved or go away with the simple act of providing, attending and/or removing a toilet.”

The City’s APTs are located at Steinbrueck Park (near Pike Place Market), Waterfront Park- Pier 58, Occidental Park (Pioneer Square), Hing Hay Park (International District), and 1801 Broadway (Capitol Hill).

Read SPU’s report on automatic public toilets, at: http://www.seattle.gov/util/About_SPU/News/Current_Issues/index.asp

In addition to providing a reliable water supply to more than 1.3 million customers in the Seattle metropolitan area, SPU provides essential sewer, drainage, solid waste and engineering services that safeguard public health, maintain the city’s infrastructure and protect, conserve and enhance the region's environmental resources.