The Minneapolis City Council approved a $700K plan for 5 – 8 public restrooms in Downtown Minneapolis
This past week, the Minneapolis City Council approved the 2026 budget that Mayor Frey proposed earlier this fall, with limited amendments. I assume Frey will not veto the budget, and we can avoid the contention between the Council and Mayor like we had last year.
One of the items the Council slipped into the 2026 budget was funding public restrooms in downtown Minneapolis. I first became aware of the public restroom project through one of my favorite Substacks: Better Minneapolis. The Star Tribune and Axios have subsequently reported on the public restroom project.
On the surface, who can be opposed to public restrooms in public places like downtown? When you go to a shopping mall in the suburbs, you expect there will be public restrooms. When you go to a Minneapolis park, you expect public restrooms, or at the very least a porta-potty.
7th Ward Council Member Katie Cashman (who recently lost her reelection bid) has advocated for downtown public restrooms (downtown is in the 7th Ward) and successfully convinced her colleagues to make them happen. I hope the public restrooms add to her legacy, but they could just as easily be a blemish on her record. The Better Minneapolis post raised legitimate concerns about the idea, noting that it is not without risk (for example, drug use, prostitution, and other unsafe situations in the restrooms).
Between the Somali social services fraud scandal, public parking, and the downtown restrooms, it has got me thinking about local governments’ use of outsourcing. The way a lot of local government works these days is outsourcing. For example, the state outsourced feeding children during the pandemic to a nonprofit, Feeding Our Future. That turned out to be a disaster, as Feeding Our Future was an elaborate con to steal money from the government and put it in the pockets of fraudsters.
The plan for the downtown restrooms is that the City will hire a for-profit or nonprofit to provide, to quote 7th Ward Policy Aide, John Micevych, as “a ‘restroom-as-a-service’ model, much like the ‘software-as-a-service’ model (SaaS) that is common in IT.” This is not necessarily a terrible idea, but my concern is that local government is not good at outsourcing, and the challenges of managing public restrooms are broader than just placing them and maintaining them (the role of the restroom-as-a-service company), as was pointed out in the Better Minneapolis post.
The other concern I have is the elected officials’ sense of “free money.” The Feeding Our Future scandal was primarily funded with federal dollars designed for pandemic relief. The state officials overseeing Feeding Our Future were able to allow the project to balloon from a $2.4 million program in 2019 to a $200 million program in 2021 by using federal funds.
The downtown public restrooms are being funded by “free money.” The $700k annual cost will come from the Streetcar Value Capture District (VCD), which was created in 2013 to collect property taxes for a streetcar on Nicollet and Central avenues. When plans for the streetcar fell through, the state Legislature allowed the City expand the fund’s purpose.
The VCD is a mystery to me. I have googled it and haven’t found much about it. I have submitted a formal data request to the city to City for more information (how big the fund is, what other purposes it has been used for, etc.). Per Cashman’s office, the VCD is a reliable long-term revenue source. The VCD was authorized for 25 years starting in 2013, so it will continue through 2038 and they don’t anticipate the restroom project impact other VCD projects. The City estimates that the $700k for the restrooms represents less than 20% of both the annual VCD revenue and projected VCD fund balance at the end of 2026, including accounting for existing VCD projects, leaving sufficient capacity for present and future priorities. In the minds of elected officials, this is free money. The reality is that the VCD is funded by Minneapolis property taxes and if it didn’t exist property taxes would be lower, granted it is probably pretty immaterial dollar amount in the grand scheme of things.
I hope to report in the future what I learn about the VCD. Based on what I know, the City’s VCD is a component of the property tax levy designated for transit purposes (which now includes broader uses beyond streetcars for which the fund was created). I guess the Council and the city’s attorneys have justified the downtown restrooms as transit-related. I truly hope the restrooms work out and they don’t become trouble spots in downtown.
The issue of where to go to the restroom when downtown is mis-understood. I think, pretty much intentionally so. When folks say “I went downtown, and there was no place to go to the restroom when I needed to” they don’t mean “there were no restroom facilities set up in the streets”. They mean “none of the businesses would let me use the restroom like you can everywhere else but downtown – in fast food restaurants, bar&grills, supermarkets, gas stations, etc., etc. No one REALLY thinks the solution to the downtown problem is “put expensive high-tech grafitti-proof self-cleaning outhouses in the streets”. No one. Seriously. The PROBLEM is not a technical or a facilities-availability problem. It is a social problem, an economics problem, and a regulatory problem. Better stated, the problem is “There are tons of restrooms downtown. Every business has at least one available to the men and women who work there and lots of businesses have many. How do we make it realistic to require allowing their use by visitors?”
I KNOW it’s a really tough problem. I KNOW why businesses do not WANT to be in the business of supplying restroom facilities, especially to those who would abuse those facilities by trashing them, doing drugs in them, having sex in them, sleeping in them, etc., etc. But THAT is the problem to be solved. We only kid ourselves when we think that putting high-tech loos in the streets will solve the problem – at ANY cost, and regardless of WHO pays.
The first step toward solving a problem is being able to discuss what the problem really is. If you’re not downtown, and you need a restroom, you can find one. If you are downtown, even though there are restrooms everywhere, you can’t GET PERMISSION to use one. THAT is the problem. It’s not an easy one to solve, but we will NEVER solve it if we can’t even say it out loud in words.
Well stated, Mr. Klein. Most people downtown have access. For example, office workers, restaurant/bar patrons, theater patrons, etc. The primary need is for homeless people – their advocates appear to have had the most energy behind the idea. I grew up in Minneapolis in the 60s and 70s, and restrooms were available in department stores and in downtown indoor malls. As retail died in downtown, so did the availability of public restrooms. One of the replies to my blog (where this was reprinted from) suggested tax incentives to businesses to make restrooms available.
The story says $700 annual cost and $700 K annual cost in different places. I’ll lean toward the $ 700,000 I suppose. I would GLADLY receive 2/3 of a million /yr to provide and service a bunch of Satellites
Thanks for catching that. The article is updated.