Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 7, 1993 TAG: 9304070015
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BUILDING TAX RELIEF PRESSURE
There appears to be no formal celebration planned for Thursday at Woodrum Field, but if you're out at the airport you may want to quietly observe a watershed in our local history.Liberation Day at Woodrum Field falls annually on April 8.
It marks the day, in 1975, that pay toilets were done away with in airport restrooms. Before that date, it cost a dime to lease a stall. Time was generously rationed - it was unlimited - but the notion of renting space on the ceramic throne rubbed some the wrong way.
By 1975, inflation had taken its toll. Nik-O-Lok had for 15 years harvested coins from lavatories male and female at the regional airport. At some point the price of relieving oneself indoors rose from Nik-O-Lok to dime-o-time, but the company never did change its name.
The airport's own advisory commission was railing against the exclusionary stalls. Pay toilets restrict access to sanitary facilities only to those wealthy enough to pay. Isn't our country great enough to offer unlimited potty rights to all, strong and weak alike?
Mayor Roy Webber called the pay toilets "barbaric."
Most hailed the City Council's bravery and progressive thinking in breaking a contract with Nik-O-Lok. Women's and men's rooms were finally liberated, travelers' rights to answer the calls of nature at no expense were secured.
Like all bold strokes of social revolution, though, there was fallout.
In 1974, the last full year of pay toilets at Roanoke Regional Airport, the city collected $3,500 in revenue from the locks - the contract called for the city to bag a percentage of Nik-O-Lok's action.
That money was made with about 610,000 passengers getting on and off airplanes yearly.
We have expertise locally - and it would be unfair to use these numbers without publicly thanking Bob Stauffer, a Roanoke College economist - to figure out what $3,500 means in 1993 dollars.
Stauffer calculates the Consumer Price Index, does a little adding-machine wizardry and figures that the city would be collecting $9,600 yearly if it still had locks on the potties.
That's no small pile of simoleons in a city that is flirting with outright groveling to get its budget balanced. A month doesn't pass that a new tax doesn't get added or an old service doesn't get lopped.
Maybe it's time to rethink our toilet tax.
It was, after all, a way to get out-of-towners to pay a for a piece of our pie - it's the same theory that buttresses toll roads and motel-room taxes.
Back in 1974, one in every 17 1/2 passengers dropped a dime into the city's coffer.
Assuming that modern expenses require toilet leases to cost 25 cents nowadays, and knowing that 652,525 people passed through our airport last year, and banking that one in 10 of our visitors will use the john (our population is getting older).
HOLY REVENUES!
We're talking here about $16,313 a year in taxes!
Lower property taxes for everybody! Better schools! No more potholes!
Let's do it.