Dori: SDOT getting rid of planters, not people who use them for restrooms

Ever since Lake City put in a large food bank, the street drug vagrants have been an exponentially horrible problem. I drive through Lake City every day on my way to work, and I’ve seen people in parking lots shooting up heroin between their toes, because every other part of their body is scarred over.

To beautify the Lake City neighborhood 20 years ago, the city put in some planter boxes with trees and flowers. There’s only one problem — the drug addicts are defecating in the planter boxes. They’re urinating in the planter boxes. They’re leaving their needles in the planter boxes. They’re sleeping in the planter boxes.

There is a wheelchair-accessible port-a-potty a block away from these planters. Yet the drug addicts are choosing to poop and urinate in the planters. Most homeless people refuse services; using heroin and living on the street is, sadly, their lifestyle of choice. When they are offered services, they turn them down.

RELATED: Lake City putting up with serial sidewalk poopers

As I was driving into work Tuesday morning, I heard that the Seattle Department of Transportation came up with a solution to the planter box problems. Get rid of the homeless? No — come on. This is Seattle. That’s not the solution.

The solution is to get rid of the concrete planter boxes.

I’m serious — I saw a huge backhoe in front of the Lake City post office when I was driving by that was demolishing the planter boxes.

Lake City business owner Dan Stearn, who owns The Fish Store, told me that SDOT’s approach “honestly doesn’t sound much like a step in any direction.”

Stearn said he often has to deal with defecation, urination, and hypodermic needles being dropped on his business’ property.

KOMO 4 News talked to the homeless vagrants who are using the planters as their own personal toilets. One of them, who called herself Kimmie, said that the reason the city is removing the planters is because of “the Bush presidency, the Iraqi War, and Libya.” (Why is it always Bush’s fault?)

Another homeless guy named Joseph said that he had named one of the trees in the planters Lucille and was sad to see Lucille go.

Well, then.

I have to say, I don’t like how KOMO, like other media outlets, plays the word game that the drug addicts themselves play — using the word “campers” instead of what they actually are, criminal vagrants. Can we stop calling them campers? Campers are people who go to Olympic National Park with a sleeping bag. These people are not campers. They’re a bunch of drug addict squatters.

So that’s the latest attempt to clean up the homeless problem in a city with the most clueless politicians of any major urban area in the United States. We have no leadership, and we should not tolerate this level of lawlessness on our streets.

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