Plan Hopes To Reduce Homeless Defecation Outside Sacramento Businesses

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — A Sacramento City Councilman is promising to take care of complaints from a business owner that people are using the outside of his building as a toilet.

Bruce Booher says he's tired of inviting customers to his business and forcing them to walk through human waste.

"I'm suppose to expose myself to their waste? It doesn't make any sense," he said.

He says his businesses on north C Street in Sacramento are targeted as toilets by the homeless community.

"This area over here I had to enclose it because they'd come up between the loading dock and there'd just be pile, pile, pile, pile," he said, describing the human waste.

In business since 2008, he's put up an iron fence and barbed wire to keep people from doing business on his property.

Those living on the streets say they've had to go to the bathroom outside.

"100, 200, 300 people are homeless, but they are not providing bathrooms," said Dale Burns. "They are desperately needed."

Sacramento City Councilman Jeff Harris, who represents the district, is studying a model used in San Francisco called the Pit Stop. They look like traveling portable toilets for the homeless.

"They're not porta-potties," he said. "They're actually flush toilets with a lavatory and they'd have to be stored in the evening and cared for."

The toilets are monitored and cleaned by a paid attendant, and it gives a way to discard hypodermic needles and pet waste.

The cost would be about $16,000 a unit, not including paying the attendant.

"Its really kind of a well-made, self-contained unit," he said.

Booher is still skeptical.

"That hasn't been tried yet so I don't know if that'll work," he said.

Harris says the city is going to launch the pilot program in the river district with just one facility in April or May.