The Big Apple can soon be at rake of new bright toilets.
A bill approved by Thursday to the City Council officials directly to create a plan to create a network of public bathrooms throughout the city.
“At this time we do not have a plan. We do not have a strategy. We have a hodgepodge of specific processes of the agency that create a disarticulated, atrophied and some could call a lack approach,” said Bill’s sponsor, Councilor Sandy Nurse on Thursday before the Board voted unanimously in support of the legislation.
The bill orders the city to develop a long -term bath plan that will be updated every year with the objective of adding at least 2,120 public bathrooms to the city by 2035, half of which would be publicly owned.
New York City currently has around 1,100 public bathrooms for its 8.6 million residents, or approximately a bath for 7,800 residents.
The nurse’s legislation aims to achieve an “objective relationship” or a bath for every 2,000 residents of the city.
“We are a growing city,” said the nurse. “But we have not been able to address this problem.”
The New York Police issued 9,904 criminal and civil citations to urinate in the Public Fiscal Year 2024, an increase of 46 percent compared to the previous year, according to the mayor’s preliminary management report.
“No one should have to experience the humiliation or stress of having to relieve in the street,” Nurse said.
The nurse said that more bathrooms would reduce public urine citation.
A fiscal impact declaration of the mayor’s office and the City Council said that the bill will not cost taxpayers money, since it only directs the City Planning Department (DCP), the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to plan For the bathrooms: the legislation does not order the agencies to build the bathrooms.
But the nurse said the bathrooms will be expectations.
“For example, a park bath with a woman and a man, separate areas, brick and mortar are almost $ 3 to $ 5 million,” Nurse said, added that he has been building for about five years.
A spokesman for the New York city parks department did not immediately respond to the post -bath cost of the public bath.
The nurse said that the planning period will help the city agencies to find ways to reduce the costs of the expensive public baths.
“There are new models out there. There are new ways in which other cities are achieving the objectives of a larger bathing network, and we are beginning to go on board with that,” Nurse said.
A public bath in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco went viral as an example of government waste when it had an initial price of $ 1.7 million in 2022. After receiving donations, the city was with a prefabricated bathroom and the total projects that are based on the total of when they totally total it when the complete ones for the total total of last year.
“I have a modular unit in my district called Portland Loo. It is the first in Brooklyn. It costs a little less than one million dollars and it is less than a year.
But in New York City, more bathrooms are not always equivalent to more opportunities to go to the bathroom. A report on the state of public bathrooms in New York City, published by the City Council last fall, said that two thirds of all the bathrooms inspected for the report were closed or had health and safety problems that made them unusable.
The council also found that 10 percent of the bathrooms had no operation, 10 percent or cooling lacked soap, 13 percent did not have toilet paper and there was garbage scattered in almost 40 percent of the bathrooms to the report.
“The parks and each agency must make it better to carry all our public spaces, our squares, our parks, our bathrooms, our garbage. Everything must be better invested. We need more capacity,” Nurse said.
A spokesman for the parks department did not respond immediately to a consultation of the publication on the cleaning of the Park Bathrooms.
Mayor Eric Adams still has to sign the bill before he becomes law. He supported a plan to add 46 public bathrooms to New York City last June.
“We need to put the resources to ride our public spaces so that we can enjoy spending time outside and that includes using the bath,” Nurse said.
