Southside Streets as Urinals

A resident of the Southside is facing assault charges for shooting a man with BB gun who refused to heed the resident’s demands that he stop urinating on his property. This after the man became fed up with the constant abuse of his residence by revelers.

So, now he must go to go court and hope for the best. Ironically, the man shot was charged with public urination but his charge was dismissed.

The history of the unsanitary, filthy behavior is one of longstanding and repeated pleas to the City for help from the residents have largely gone unheeded. If something is not done, it is just a matter of time before someone gets badly hurt.

If the City cannot offer adequate police patrols, it should require the restaurants, bars and saloons to build an adequate supply of public convenience facilities and keep them clean. Obviously, their own facilities are not enough to keep folks from wandering into alleyways or storefronts to relieve themselves. Anyone caught by police publicly urinating would be assigned toilet cleanup duty for two weekends. A second offense, three months and a third offense, 30 days in jail.

The City should ask the County for a share of the drink tax revenue collected by Southside establishments to help with patrols and perhaps construct toilet facilities to prevent drunks and miscreants from having to relieve themselves wherever they please. There was a proposal for an improvement district and an additional tax, but that plan did not move past City Council.

In short, this problem is not a hard one to fix as City Council apparently believes it is. When one of your neighborhoods is being treated like a sewer by residents and non-residents alike, the Council should get angry and act accordingly.