The Ottawa Patriots Baseball Team is stepping up to the plate to cover the cost of an accessible portable toilet, something they say is a basic necessity the city should be paying for. Tauvette Park in Blackburn Hamlet has three baseball diamonds and two soccer pitches, but no city-funded public washroom. “If it was up to me there’d be at least two or three but one at least does the job,” says the team’s co-president, Paul Villeneuve. The park can see upwards of 100 people using it during peak hours and on weekends throughout the season, and the Ottawa Patriots use it all summer long. “When we have out-of-town teams coming in, it’s pretty embarrassing when we have to ask them to go to a local restaurant or Tim Hortons to use the washroom,” Villeneuve said. The baseball team has been paying for a portable toilet at Tauvette Park for the better part of a decade. Last year, the city covered the cost of the toilet, but the team says it opted not to pay for it this year due to “low usage.” That leaves the team footing a bill of about $350 a month throughout the season. “Our parents basically pay fees for the kids to play, so theoretically you have the taxpayers paying for the porta-potty that I think the city should provide,” Villeneuve said. Last year, city council passed a motion securing city-wide funding to extend hours at existing bathrooms in parks and recreational facilities, or to install porta-potties. City data and local partnerships help determine where they go. “We want to look at: Is this park a district park? Are there multiple user groups? Is it something that we don’t have the opportunity to partner with a sports entity or a community group?” says Orleans West-Innes Coun. Laura Dudas. While the city would love to have a publicly funded washroom at every park across the city, Dudas says there is no plan for that right now. Each ward gets $4,500 a year in funding. That’s enough to cover the cost of operating and cleaning about 3 portable toilets. “The city is slowly making progress in terms of rolling out these portable facilities,” Dudas says. “And as councillors, what we do is we look at the limited money that we have available to us and we try to get the most user groups involved with partnering with us to get the most bang for our buck.”
