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Roger Rabbits with |
I’m sitting on a park bench in glorious sunshine at a Shangri-la I have discovered on the Ōmokoroa Peninsula.
It’s what reporters do. When not seeking out truth or exposing crime and evil, we sit in the sun and muse. There are a couple of seagulls on steroids, they’re squabbling, and there’s a smatter of applause for Mavis who’s just quadruple-bogeyed the 15th over the fence.
This beautiful space is appropriately named Precious Family Reserve.
But the dictates of nature mean I won’t be able to stop long and enjoy it.
Septuagenarians need to pee up to 10 times a day depending on the weather and the number of espressos that have been gargled. I calculate that in an hour-and-a-bit I will pressingly need to be elsewhere. Because there’s no provision for bodily functions at Shangri-la. No public bathroom.
One could slope off into the bush, I suppose, but a member of the Fourth Estate doesn’t need a conviction for “casting offensive matter”. And imagine if everyone who wandered through the Precious Family Reserve did likewise. It’s like trash ... pack it, bottle it, take it home with you.
This toilet talk has come about because I am wrestling with an issue for our time: public dunnies.
It’s causing a right old stink – figuratively. And could become a bigger stink – literally.
Paper dunny
It’s a lone dunny, a one-pan, paper dunny. Not a tissue-paper dunny, but a paper dunny on a paper council plan. It’s a proposal.
And whether we ever hear one gurgle from that planned facility is a matter of conjecture because it has opponents spiralling in a tizz around the S-bend even before it is installed. If it ever gets installed.
Some 379 Ōmokoroa folk are opposed to plans for the dunny in the Precious Family Reserve in Ōmokoroa, Tauranga’s oceanside retreat for mature and genteel folk.
They’ve signed a “halt construction” petition to the Western Bay of Plenty District Council. Fair enough, they’re serious.
The proposed facility is neither wise nor wanted, they say. It will be an eyesore, there’s no demand, in the wrong place, could attract vagrants and the $80,000 cost of taking a pee is untenable.
I stumbled on this as I was thumbing through a council agenda on the pillow the other night. Some people take Temazepam, I read council agendas. Anyhow, it got me wondering deep into the night – are plans for a new public dunny really a hill people want to die on?
So that’s why I am here at the “hill”, in paradise, sitting on a park bench in the sun, seeing for myself. It’s called research.
Pay to do business
The petitioners certainly have a point. Precious by name and by nature, the sweeping white sand seaside reserve is undeniably something of great value and beauty and not to be treated carelessly. But would it be spoiled by a well-designed and planted-out public bathroom plonked discreetly in a corner of the reserve?
A lot more people would get to know and love the Precious Family Reserve if they understood that in a people-centred place there’s a bathroom available.
That’s something that will occupy the greater minds of engineers, architects, planners, politicians et al – those charged with prudently dispensing the rated dollar to keep us happy, and comfortable, when we’re caught short.
I have read that a public bathroom can have economic benefits. Did anyone stop in Kawakawa before Hundertwasser turned peeing into art appreciation? Now you hold on to get to Kawakawa just for the experience.
A well-planned public toilet network can generate revenue through advertising, partnerships with local businesses and pay-per-use systems. Taupō SuperLoo has charged 50 cents to do business for many years and now Ashburton is pondering a pay-per-use model to offset vandalism.
Fence-sitter
In the minds of some, the best public toilet is one you don’t have to use – preferring instead to clench cheeks, lock legs and fight the urges of nature to make it home.
Which reminds me of some road trips, when regardless of where we were headed, north, east, west or south, we had to pass through Matamata because they had the “nicest” public bathroom east of the alpine fault. That bathroom stop would also require me to pump a couple of hours’ worth of hard-earned coin into the local economy via pies, sandwiches, chips and drinks.
It was an expensive pee.
In the meantime, the seagulls have settled and Mavis has shanked her tee shot on the 16th. And I have set aside my concern over a public dunny for the Precious Family Reserve. It’s too hard. The bench-sitter is also a fence-sitter.