The City of Saskatoon is looking to expand a washroom security project that’s reducing frequent vandalism and damage in public washrooms along the river. “A monitor model would add a visible onsite presence for regular inspections, incident response and reporting with our objective of improving availability and service reliability,” Shane McKechney, the city’s facilities manager, said. The city’s environment, utilities and corporate services committee met Tuesday to explore hiring security to monitor public washrooms at the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan site at Mendel Park, the River Landing pavilion, the Permanent Outdoor Festival area and the Victoria Park Boathouse. The city says the estimated annual operating cost is approximately $276,000 per site. However, city administration explained those costs are minimal compared to repeated vandalism and damage to these washrooms, costing the city roughly $5,000 in repairs and cleanup per incident. Between Jan. 1 and June 30, the city says its public washroom network was closed for 9,372 hours. When factoring in the 11 stalls operating for 13 hours a day, those bathrooms were closed for nearly 40 per cent of their scheduling open hours. The outdoor festival site washrooms and the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan stalls accounted for 84 per cent of the recorded closures. Vandalism and damage are the number one cause of closures. “These incidents are not isolated. They repeatedly reduce availability and require asset assessment, cleanup, repairs and safety checks before reopening,” McKechney said. On Tuesday, administration detailed how on Sept. 9, four of the five year-round washrooms at the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan site were closed because of extensive damage from one incident. Photos displayed in council chambers showed the sinks from each stall completely ripped from the wall and smashed to pieces. Other sites had pools of blood, graffiti and drug paraphernalia left behind. One had an air conditioning unit disconnected and thrown to the ground. When factoring in the annual operating costs compared to the repair costs, the city says it would take 55 incidents avoided every year to break even. “We’re recommending a full, fully monitored site, and we have seen proof [of] that at North Kiwanis,” Pam Hamoline, the city’s director of facilities management, told the committee. “That’s the most successful model to reduce or eliminate almost all vandalism and remain open.” The city has run a pilot project at public washrooms next to the Meewasin skating rink at the North Kiwanis Park since 2024, which became permanent this year. Two commissionaires are posted on site from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., from May 1 to Oct. 31, and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., from Nov. 1 to April 30. That location accounted for 88 of the reported 798 incidents between January and June. During that time, the washrooms were closed for a combined nine hours and remained open 99.8 per cent of the time. Every other public washroom is opened and checked three times throughout the day, and the city says that leaves plenty of time for them to be damaged by the public. “What we have found is that it’s reactive in nature,” Hamoline said. “In between those checks, the community is finding ways to get into the washrooms, and vandalism is happening at that time. So, we can recommend any scale of monitoring that council would like to see.” Rather than have city council discuss added security at its council meeting later this month, the committee voted to move the item over to budget deliberations in November.
