San Francisco Flushing $1.7M to Construct One Public Toilet

Spencer Brown   October 22, 2022

The City by the Bay is not known for being well-run or fiscally responsible. Homelessness, a drug overdose crisis, spiking crime, and ample sidewalk fecal matter have made it a punchline of what leftist "utopias" actually end up becoming in practice when radical Democrat policies are implemented. 

Now, San Francisco is working on trying to address one issue by constructing a public toilet — that will apparently cost $1.7 million and won't be finished until 2025. Even more comically, California state Assemblyman Matt Haney was set to celebrate the boondoggle with a press conference, but he was forced to cancel his potty party after public backlash. 

The million-plus dollar price tag is being covered by state funds secured by Haney collected from Golden State taxpayers in order to build, unbelievably, "just one toilet in 150 square feet of space," according to The San Francisco Chronicle. 

Once Haney found out from news reports that San Francisco "had no compelling reason for the $1.7 million price tag or its 2025 opening date, he wiped his 12:30 p.m. news conference from his calendar" after apparently not questioning why a single toilet in a small shelter would demand such a high price tag.

For context, the most expensive toilet currently sold by Home Depot — which features a built-in bidet, warm air bum dryer, self-cleansing UV light, heated seat, led bowl lighting, automatic motion-activated opening and closing lid, and an LED touch-screen remote — is $5,325.00. With the funds allocated to San Francisco's one toilet and small structure, the government could have bought more than 315 of the most luxurious toilets sold by Home Depot. 

After getting called out for the cost and timeline of the project, Haney will apparently "send Recreation and Park Director Phil Ginsburg a formal letter asking for a fuller explanation for how one little bathroom can cost as much as a single-family home and take more than two years to build."

More via the Chronicle, which notes "[t]he fact San Francisco public officials were even planning to celebrate one toilet that might eventually get built after years of neighbors begging for it tells you how little there is to celebrate in the city these days."

“When Rec and Park first told us the number, it sounded shockingly high to me, and I think your article has revealed that their process around this is broken and the number is inexplicable,” Haney told me Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m glad that Noe Valley will at some point get a bathroom, but it shouldn’t cost this much and it shouldn’t take this long, and I’m angry about it,” Haney said, his voice rising. “It’s not something I want to celebrate right now.”

Tamara Aparton, spokesperson for Rec and Park, said the department is happy to share “any and all available details” about the project. She said both the cost and timeline are estimates and the department will work to bring them down.

The "commode kerfuffle," as the Chronicle put it, is not the only recent example of San Francisco city bureaucrats attempting to undertake simple projects but ending up with literally unbelievable price tags. 

As Townhall reported last July, the liberal stronghold was giving serious consideration to throwing $500,000 at designing and producing 15 prototype trash cans that would keep vandals and the city's homeless population from getting into the city's waste.

San Francisco Flushing $1.7M to Construct One Public Toilet (townhall.com)