Don't we pay enough in taxes? Here we are in 2011 and I'm afraid that we are slipping back to the dark ages.
Take, for example, the recent closure of the public restrooms at the New Rochelle Amtrak station. New Rochelle is a suburb of New York City. Roughly 2,000 commuters use this station to travel to their jobs in NYC, every day. Although I live in the midwest, I am familiar with the New Rochelle Train Station. In High School, I used to catch the "A" bus, there, on my way home to Mount Vernon.
Anyway, the public restrooms at the train station, which had been open 5:25 AM - 9:00 PM weekdays, are now closed! Vandalism is said to be the problem.
New Rochelle's City Manager, Charles Strome, gives us the straight poop:
“Our police department has ceded a 10-percent reduction in staff so we don’t have regular patrols there like we used to. So all in all it was costing us a significant amount of money to keep the bathrooms open at the train station.”
Here's the solution!!!
The station is open 15 1/2 hours a day. You can hire 2 people to be on hand during those hours. Pay them each $10/hour. That comes to $310 a day or $0.16 per customer! Take $0.20 out of every ticket and you'll have money left over...for, I don't know...toilet paper?
