Every time there’s a serious drawback confronting our state or one among its localities, officers blather concerning the lack of public cash accessible to handle the problem.
But one small effort to handle a serious concern in San Francisco — town’s lack of public bogs and a extensively publicized human feces epidemic on many metropolis streets — reveals that cash is never the rationale for inadequate progress.
Eight years in the past, metropolis officers opened the Noe Valley City Sq., a neighborhood park that encompasses a farmers’ market, playground and gathering spot for occasions.
The challenge was plumbed for a public rest room, however, as The New York Occasions reported final month, town ran out of money and it by no means was constructed.
Quick ahead to 2022, when town secured $1.7 million in state funding to lastly set up a 150-square-foot rest room and even deliberate a ribbon-cutting.
Sixteen months later there’s nonetheless no functioning bathroom. In keeping with the newest stories, the restroom is predicted to open in April — and solely after a non-public bathroom firm supplied to donate a modular unit and an structure and engineering agency agreed to do website work and pay staff on their very own.
Even with donations, the restroom is predicted to value the general public $725,000, though the challenge has been expanded to incorporate one other bathroom or two after the governor intervened.
Usually, minor public-works initiatives don’t develop into information tales, however “Toiletgate” has garnered nationwide consideration as a result of it’s emblematic of San Francisco’s — and California’s — incapacity to carry out even essentially the most primary features.
Per the Occasions: “If a military of greater than 30,000 metropolis staff with a $14 billion annual funds can not construct a easy rest room in an inexpensive approach, what hope is there that San Francisco can resolve its housing scarcity and fentanyl disaster?”
That’s certainly the $1.7-million query.
The reply is that town can’t resolve any of its issues, at the very least till it figures out the best way to streamline its approval and spending processes.
With out such reforms, merely spending extra public cash is the equal of flushing it down a (nonexistent) bathroom.
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