Jake: Seattle is flushing money away — again

Much has already been written about Seattle’s new public toilets, which Mayor Katie Wilson dedicated last Friday with a ceremonial toilet paper cutting (points for originality).

Like many of you, I greeted the news with a hearty eye roll — as I often do when reading about anything that happens in Seattle.

I have nothing against portable toilets. I avoid them when I can, but I’m grateful for them in a pinch. Everyone understands the value proposition: They’re cheap, easy to clean, and you can drop them anywhere. But of course, Seattle doesn’t like to do things the easy way.

Seattle’s high-end answer to the porta-potty problem

The city is paying $465,000 for a year of four toilets  — units made by a company called Throne Labs that play soothing music, dispense flowery fragrance, and require a phone app to unlock. By some estimates, that’s roughly 39 times the price of a traditional plastic porta-potty.

These are closer to something you’d encounter at a nice wedding than a city sidewalk.

I wonder what that approval meeting looked like. Seattle is staring down a nearly $500 million budget deficit over the next three years. Was there anyone in that room who raised a cautious hand and said: ‘Hey, what if we just went with traditional porta-potties and saved a bleep-ton of money?’

I wonder if anyone in that room remembers Seattle’s last great toilet adventure. Back in 2004, the city installed five high-tech self-cleaning toilets for $5 million, promising a spacious, multilingual, automated experience.

What happened next was peak Seattle. Workers had to clean the stalls after trash clogged the self-cleaning mechanism, meaning the technology didn’t work as advertised and just spread feces and other disgusting substances all over the toilet seats. And because these toilets were sold as low-maintenance, nobody was checking on them, which meant it wasn’t just germs flourishing inside. The automated loos became better known for drug use and prostitution than for relief.

The city eventually cut its losses and tried to offload the toilets on eBay. The first attempt failed — nobody met the $89,000 minimum bid. On the second try, with no minimum, 148 bids were cast and all five toilets sold to a Thurston County company for $12,549 total — against a $5 million investment.

This time it’s a service contract, not a $5 million asset

Now, it’s worth noting that the current Throne contract appears to be a rental or service agreement, not an ownership purchase. The city is paying Throne to operate the pilot program, which means there may be nothing to sell on eBay when this is over. Whether that’s better or worse is genuinely unclear to me. Either way, $465,000 for four portable toilets doesn’t sound like a great deal.

I’ll end on a positive note if I can: At least this is a whole lot cheaper than the million-dollar toilets.

So even if Seattle is flushing money away again, at least they’re not flushing quite as much. So at least they won’t get clogged.

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