New HP Policy Takes Toilets to Task
On Monday, Highland Park’s building inspections department will introduce a policy designed to clean up residential construction sites by requiring that all portable toilets in plain view from the street be concealed by a wooden screen on three sides.
The policy will make an exception for mobile lavatories that are in the rear of the property. It also stipulates that those portable units need to be removed from adjacent property lines by a minimum distance of 10 percent of the lot width. There’s no word yet on whether contractors will raise a stink.
“Historically we’ve always gotten really good cooperation and compliance from our builders,” said HP town spokesman Lance Koppa. “I don’t see us having any problems with it just being a policy.”
Ordinances, policies, and rules are useless until there is enforcement, and enforced management, by the the building inspections dept., law enforcement, the town manager, Mayor Williams, and the HP Town Council.
For example, a portable toilet used by a home development site in HP should never have been allowed to be placed, parked, and block, a public sidewalk for weeks without someone noticing from HP Town Hall (either elected or employed). It is really not that difficult to have noticed a simple violation of current law, yet go unenforced. A new policy was not needed (as the one proposed in the article) for anyone at HP Town Hall to simply remove the toilet from public property.
It just seems hypocritical to me that HP elected officials, and administration, chose to litigate about the view of a development by a Dallas developer near Abbott Park, yet the public was forced to view, and manuever around, a stinky nasty portable toilet, placed in clear view on the same street, Abbott. I will save the “omg’s” by not e-mailing the picture of the portable toilet on the sidewalk to the PCP.
As with the lawsuit, it ends up with nothing but a big loss for our town and it’s reputation. My opinion.