Public Money Goes to School Toilets, Brooklyn Voters Decide

When City Councilman Brad Lander asked voters in his Brooklyn district to decide how to distribute $1 million to worthy community projects, he might have guessed that some of the money might end up in the potty.

It has. For the second straight year, a school bathroom renovation project was chosen by Mr. Lander’s constituents for funding through the program known as participatory budgeting. This one, a $110,000 makeover, is at Public School 58 in Carroll Gardens, home to some very old toilets.

Last year, a restroom overhaul at P.S. 124 in Park Slope was the top vote-getter in Mr. Lander’s district.

Mr. Lander, whose district runs from Cobble Hill to Kensington, was one of eight council members who took part in participatory budgeting this year. His constituents put forth more than 600 proposals including new school and library computers, strategic tree planting and sidewalk refurbishing. Twenty-four of them were up for balloting in the voting that ended this month.

The P.T.A. at the Carroll School, as P.S. 58 is known, bolstered the case for a bathroom face-lift by handing out fliers and making a video (see above).

According to the P.T.A., the school’s four girls’ rooms and four boys’ rooms have not been updated since 1954. The paper-towel dispensers are prone to broken handles, and some are too high for youngsters to reach.

But the biggest offenders are the Sputnik-age toilet flushers â€" flat metal buttons on the wall of the stalls and urinals.

“The flushing mechanisms are antiquated and a lot of the kids can’t use it, so the toilets don’t get flushed,” said Henry Carrier, a co-president of the P.T.A. “It almost invites kids to kick them.”

When the flushers don’t work, the children walk away from waste-filled toilets in frustration. That combined with old, dusty vents make for a less-than-desirable bathroom experience, according to the video, which depicts boys walking away from the bathroom stalls with pinched noses.

“Particularly towards the end of the day, the bathroom near the cafeteria where you get the entire student population â€" it wasn’t particularly pleasant,” Mr. Carrier said. “Adults are prohibited from going in there, so you can’t monitor what’s going on. So unless you see water flooding out of there, you don’t know.”

With funding secured, the P.T.A. will work with the Department of Education to install automated flushers, high-capacity toilet paper dispensers and fresh vent covers.

“I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations,” said Mr. Carrier. Assuming the school’s 900 students use the restrooms twice a day, and the new fixtures will last 20 to 25 years, the $110,000 cost will cover 8 million bathroom visits.

That, he said, seemed like a good deal.

Other winning projects in Mr. Lander’s district included $300,000 for safety improvements on Church Avenue and $170,000 for new trees and tree pits on Third Avenue, as well as Smartboard interactive whiteboards for two schools ($180,000 and $115,000).

The councilman’s press secretary, Alex Moore, said that proposals for school improvements tended to fall into two categories: “Fixing the grossest thing in the school versus making a tangible, educational investment.”

Mr. Lander, he said, “thinks it’s great that the community is using participatory budgeting to show their priories for funding.”