can’t help but wonder if a big part of why bryant park spends $27k per year on toilet paper is that, if there are so few toilets in the city, probably many more people will cram into the few toilets that do exist? especially if they are the nicest public ones in the whole city! i’m not a full time professional in nyc politics like you, but i guess from my naive perspective, even if $500M can’t be dropped by an order of magnitude, isn’t this still less than half of a single percent of the city budget? a third of this would be covered by just cutting subway cop overtime, which apparently was $155M in 2023 up from $4M in 2022
Thanks Robert for the thoughtful note! Especially putting the cost into perspective. I agree it’s a small amount of the overall pie— and that’s an important point. $500M isn’t breaking the city budget.
But every dollar of new spending still requires new revenue. And in the case of public toilets, there are actually pretty good ways of recouping those dollars without raising taxes.
If there are ways we can save in expenses from other departments, we should do that. But those savings don’t usually get moved over to different departments to fund new fun projects.
I'm wondering if there's a role here for corporate sponsorship or an "adopt a restroom" campaign to cover maintenance costs? "This fine restroom brought to you by Coldwell Banker"...doesn't address the costs of actually building the facility, but could cover on-going O&M?
We need more fun and creative ideas like this! I bet corporate sponsorships could make a real difference in helping to maintain public restrooms. It’s definitely worth exploring! 😃
Not so fun fact: NYPD has gone over budget by $500-700 million each of the past three years…
That’s a pretty substantial budget overrun. It’s definitely an area that could use some close attention from city leaders to get under control.
can’t help but wonder if a big part of why bryant park spends $27k per year on toilet paper is that, if there are so few toilets in the city, probably many more people will cram into the few toilets that do exist? especially if they are the nicest public ones in the whole city! i’m not a full time professional in nyc politics like you, but i guess from my naive perspective, even if $500M can’t be dropped by an order of magnitude, isn’t this still less than half of a single percent of the city budget? a third of this would be covered by just cutting subway cop overtime, which apparently was $155M in 2023 up from $4M in 2022
Thanks Robert for the thoughtful note! Especially putting the cost into perspective. I agree it’s a small amount of the overall pie— and that’s an important point. $500M isn’t breaking the city budget.
But every dollar of new spending still requires new revenue. And in the case of public toilets, there are actually pretty good ways of recouping those dollars without raising taxes.
If there are ways we can save in expenses from other departments, we should do that. But those savings don’t usually get moved over to different departments to fund new fun projects.
I'm wondering if there's a role here for corporate sponsorship or an "adopt a restroom" campaign to cover maintenance costs? "This fine restroom brought to you by Coldwell Banker"...doesn't address the costs of actually building the facility, but could cover on-going O&M?
We need more fun and creative ideas like this! I bet corporate sponsorships could make a real difference in helping to maintain public restrooms. It’s definitely worth exploring! 😃