Seattle's gold-plated toilet mistake

Seattle's automated public toilet experiment is a bust. The city should cut its significant losses, cancel the contract, pay the penalty and move these dens of iniquity out of their five Seattle locations.

The high-tech toilets were launched a few years ago to provide a safe, clean place to go to the bathroom for Seattle's homeless, tourists and others with no other place to freshen up. Cost to the city is about $600,000 a year. The toilets have turned into publicly subsidized drug and prostitution parlors. A security guard at the waterfront location filmed nine people piling into the bathroom at once.

City Attorney Tom Carr believes users sometimes disable the time sensors, which have been set to 15 minutes, and later to 10 minutes. Nine people. Want to bet they weren't discussing Plato?

After 10 minutes, the door opens and then a self-cleaning process begins.

The bottom line is the toilets are not used often enough for the original purpose. Some homeless people say they wouldn't dare venture in because of safety concerns about unsavory activities going on inside. Bathroom cleaners often find drug paraphernalia left behind.

Getting rid of the toilets will not be cheap. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to break the contract with the vendor, but that is exactly what ought to happen.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, who inherited this problem from the City Council, is contemplating increased staffing and lighting, reduced usage time and placement of exterior cameras to dissuade users from conducting drug deals. Staffing sounds expensive, and if users can dismantle time sensors, they can block or disable cameras.

The original idea for the toilets came from the need to stop people from urinating and defecating in public — all of which is still going on.

The next plan ought to be low-tech port-a-potties in locations where bathrooms are not available for homeless people and other citizens. The best thing anyone can say about port-a-potties is most people don't want to linger too long because of the aroma.

Hit the flush button on a project whose time has come and gone.