The real reason ‘Rubber-stamp’ Raman wants more wildly expensive public toilets

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Nithya Raman’s asking for (toilet) trouble.

The socialist city councilwoman, who’s running to “fail up” to the mayor’s office, has proposed a new plan that has the potential to incur new, hampering costs on a city already suffering from a $1 billion budget deficit. 

Among the latest: plans for a nebulous network of public restrooms.

The city has to be make sure if they are spending money on toilets, it is not flushing millions of taxpayers’ dollars down the toilet — like the city previously did in a similar project in Runyon Canyon.

Raman introduced a motion Wednesday to add bathroom stalls across the city, despite LA’s failure to maintain the public restrooms it already has. She wants city staff to spend a couple of months producing suggestions on where such loos would go and how the city would pay for them.

Public toilets are a mainstay across advanced countries in Europe. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the desire to provide the public with a place to relieve themselves.

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The problem is the unknown (but judging from New York City’s experience, likely exorbitant) cost of implementation, the sustained maintenance required to keep them clean and public safety enforcement to prevent them from becoming drug dens. 

Therein lies the rub.

Los Angeles, which burns up to a billion tax dollars a year on its homeless Dumpster fire, is allegedly too broke to properly fund public safety: The city’s police and fire departments are absurdly under-resourced.

Yet Raman, rather than cleaning up the streets and improving public safety, would squander city cash on public restrooms to prop up (or worse) the status quo?

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Raman’s fellow traveler in Democratic socialism, is tinkering with a public toilet plan, which will cost a pretty penny: Seventeen planned high-tech toilets will cost the Big Apple’s budget $245k apiece, part of a $4 million plan.

Should Raman be elected mayor and pursue a similar policy, LA’s deficit-plagued budget risks falling further out of balance. 

If and when the public-toilet stinker is put to a vote of the City Council, its members should (of course) flush it.

LA has a record of installing and “maintaining” public restrooms — and it’s a grim one.

City Hall infamously spent close to $1 million on a piddling shed of a restroom at Runyon Canyon, a top hiking spot, while skimping on park security.

And Raman’s own pro-potty motion points to failure: A 2001 deal with a private contractor imagined 150 public toilets and delivered 14. Today, only four replacement johns are working, per Raman’s motion — which blames (of course) funding shortages.

But somehow the city will have the money — and the capability — for a new toilet on every block?

Rubber-stamp Raman wants loos along public streets, ostensibly to serve homeless people, outdoor workers, tourists and pedestrians.

She even suggested a new city department, responsible for overseeing public restrooms. 

But workers, tourists and people out strolling are not in dire need of overpriced and befouled public bathrooms. They seem to find restrooms just fine as it is.

And a new city department? More salaries, pensions, red tape and bureaucracy? For restrooms? Even in LA, this reads as ambitious, and also as farce.

Let’s be real: The city can’t afford more public toilets. It needs a better approach to getting homeless people off the streets.

This means swapping “housing first” ideology for “sobriety and treatment first” common sense.

It means shutting down the city’s homeless industrial complex: a multibillion-dollar system in which nonprofits and other organizations are incentivized to keep taxpayer dollars flowing to them by entrenching, rather than abating, homeless squalor on the streets. 

So what is Raman’s reason for advancing the toilet plan?

The proposal suggests that long-term, she and the DSA don’t want to remove homeless people — including 50 square blocks of filthy Skid Row encampments — from the streets. 

It suggests they want to normalize the filthy encampments, crime, drug dens and endless stream of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded interventions that do little but perpetuate the problem.

It’s enough to make voters wonder if it’s all a big grift.

It’s also a preview of what’s to come if Raman’s elected mayor.