Activist calls for extended washroom hours
Mayor says the city is looking into providing better drinking water sources for community
A Peterborough community activist is upset the city has not extended its hours for washrooms and implemented hydration stations in the city.
Dan Hennessey has been advocating for extended hours for public washrooms and for the opening of a hydration station in the downtown core where more marginalized populations tend to congregate.
He said he has not only heard from the homeless community but the elderly population too about the lack of services when out walking along the trails that lead to Millennium Park.
“There are no publicly accessible drinking fountains,” Hennessey said. “There is no one going around handing out bottles of water making sure people stay hydrated, there is nobody doing outreach at all at the street level.”
The city currently has no drinking fountains accessible to the public. Rogers Cove has water fountain hookups, but during the winter they are removed and replaced in the spring.
Hennessey said as of right now, the drinking fountain has not been hooked back up because of the pandemic.
Last summer, Hennessey said businesses, specifically restaurants, helped people by letting them refill their bottles and cups with water and use bathrooms, but that changed this year with the COVID-19 pandemic leaving restaurants closed.
Hennessey said he would not be surprised if people were not allowed to use bathrooms or get bottles filled with water once restaurants are allowed to reopen as state of emergency restrictions get lifted.
Public bathrooms have had their own unique issues when it comes to accommodating people in the city centre. Millennium Park and Beavermead Park each have a publicly accessible bathroom. The bathrooms were reopened on June 1 as part of the relaxation of COVID-19 protocols in the city. The bathrooms are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day.
Hennessey sees this as troublesome because marginalized people who live on the streets still need to go to the bathroom 24 hours a day.
“It impacts them huge,” Hennessey said. “They are forced to go in the bushes or behind the building. Sometimes there is no toilet paper available to them, so they use whatever is at hand.”
For Hennessey, the big issue is access to drinking water for the people who do not necessarily have regular access to it.
“There is no water refill stations,” he said. “People are getting dehydrated, I have seen some of my friends drinking river water, so you have people with compromised immune systems, we are in the middle of a pandemic and then I see people drinking from the river because they are thirsty.”
Peterborough Mayor Diane Therrien said she is looking into how they can provide better sources of drinking water in the community.
“That’s something we’re looking into. Because I know people get a bottle of water at One Roof with lunch, but that’s certainly not enough on days like today, where there’s 30-degree weather.”
Aside from public washrooms, she said, “there’s not a lot of access to the refilling stations” since the transit station indoor space and library are closed.