Clean restroom law now in effect

Clean public restrooms are now required by DeKalb County law.

Passed in March and effective as of June 27, a new county ordinance prohibits facilities with public restrooms “from allowing those restrooms to exist in a state of bad repair during operating hours.”

The ordinance, which carries a fine of $100, allows enforcement of the clean bathroom law by police officers, code enforcement officers or the DeKalb County Board of Health.

During the March 25 Board of Commissioners’ meeting when the ordinance was passed, Commissioner Stan Watson, who introduced it, said, “The ordinance is not trying to tell people what they can do in their bathrooms, but by regulating the public restrooms, the county is…undertaking the public health and welfare of its citizens. I think this will help our county.”

This ordinance mandates businesses, stores, offices, parks and other places where goods or services are sold or provided to operate restrooms that are clean, safe and functioning. This amendment also includes DeKalb County parks, schools, colleges or universities under the same directive.

“It is of the utmost importance that we set standards for DeKalb County that enhance quality of life,” said Watson in a statement.

Dr. Tom Keating, founder and coordinator of Project CLEAN–Citizens, Learners and Educators Against Neglect, said he has been working for 20 years on improving school restrooms.
“It began in the late 1980s—our son had no doors on his restroom at school,” Keating said. “Our daughter had no sanitary product dispensers or receptacles and our neighbor held it in all day.

After hearing from those three students, Keating interviewed hundreds of students about clean bathrooms and “realized no one was working on this.”

“The young kids themselves can’t turn the issue around,” Keating said. “They can’t take a nasty restroom and make it nice. It takes caring adults also.”

“Then, about two years ago I realized that the same 70,000 middle and high school kids in DeKalb County…go to a library, they go to a park, they go to a rec center, they go to the swimming pools and they go to MARTA stations,” he said.

“If there’s no toilet paper, it very hard for a kid to handle that,” said Keating, who has a blog on the subject at www.projectclean.us. “Although the kid may have thrown the toilet paper all over the toilet, you’ve got to have both a change in attitude and behavior of the youngsters that do this and hopefully if you start at school it will carry over to these other public restrooms.

“Ultimately it starts at home but you can’t control a home as easily as you can affect what goes on at schools and other places,” he said.

“The ordinance requires restrooms to be functional and available,” Keating said. “The goal is that restrooms should be safe, clean and hygienic.”

Since the ordinance became effective in June, Keating said he has seen five restrooms in his travels that were in bad repair.

“One was in a business establishment,” he said. “The [owner] is actually getting a new door because the door was off the hinges, there was no lock and it was just horrible. It was [in] one of our malls.”

When residents discover an unclean public restroom, they now have recourse, Keating said.
“I think a citizen should go talk to a manager of the establishment, the park, the school, the university first,” he said.

Improving public bathrooms and implementing the new ordinance takes awareness, Keating said.

“If you want your family to eat better and you want them to exercise more…we should talk about the third ‘e,’ because the third ‘e’ is ‘eliminate properly,’” Keating said. “You can’t eliminate properly if the bathrooms are in bad repair.”