Vandals of portable toilets: Consider this your warning.
After a state law goes into effect Dec. 1, anyone who "steals ... destroys, defaces or vandalizes" those plastic toilets-on-the-go faces misdemeanor criminal charges tailored to protect the devices.
The potential penalties for a toilet vandal include a fine set by a judge or a stretch in the county lock-up for as long as 120 days, depending on a person's criminal record. Not to mention the awkwardness such charges might bring to future job interviews.
Members of North Carolina's small but determined portable toilet industry pushed the newly defined crime through the legislature this spring, fed up with pranks that often leave them with busted toilets and a messy cleanup.
Carey Mack, operations manager for Raleigh-based Readilite & Barricade Inc., said the company has about 4,000 toilets, and he estimated as many as 200 of them a month are rendered unusable after being set on fire, spray-painted or tipped. It can take $500 to $750 to replace a standard portable toilet and as much as $2,000 for a handicapped stall, he said.
"I've been doing this for 18 years and I've been scratching my head for 18 years wondering why they're doing it," Mack said.
Though intentionally vandalizing or burning the portable units was already covered under existing vandalism and larceny laws, the portable toilet industry wanted a law that specifically spoke to their problems, said Joe McClees, a lobbyist working for both the North Carolina portable toilet and septic pumper concerns.
Once the law goes into effect Dec. 1, owners can post warnings, similar to signs cautioning shoplifters in a store's dressing rooms, spelling out the repercussions of spray-painting witty messages on the side of the toilets. McClees said he hopes the new statute also means that law enforcement will take the vandalism more seriously.
State Rep. Lucy Allen, a Louisburg Democrat, sponsored the bill after hearing about the problems from McClees and constituents in her districts.
"People laugh when they see a bill like this," Allen said. "But it really is a serious problem."
The passage came as welcome news to many in the industry, including Melissa Thompson of T-N-T Porta Potty, a Sneads Ferry business with 600 units that go primarily to construction sites.
Thompson has portable toilets destroyed when vandals set rolls of toilet paper on fire and the whole structure melts.
Fireworks become an incinerator of choice around July 4, she said.
The allure is beyond Thompson.
"If I've got to go in one of them, I'm not going to be in there long enough to be doing all that," she said.
Great moments in portable toilet history
-- Male workers at Minnesota's Eveleth Mines tipped portable toilets while female workers were using them in a scene in "North Country," a 2005 film based on a landmark 1984 sexual harassment lawsuit.
-- The Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" discovered in March 2005 that lighting a cigarette inside a portable toilet won't cause an explosion because methane gas levels are too low.
-- Until 2008, human racers sprinted across long rows of portable toilets while the crowd pelted them with beer cans in the "Running of the Urinals," a phased-out tradition at the Preakness horse race in Baltimore. Event organizers created a video simulation to replace the run.
-- The National Park Service lined up 5,000 portable toilets on the National Mall during President Barack Obama's inauguration in January.
E-mail Sarah Ovaska at sarah.ovaska(at)newsobserver.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
A man accused in March of taking an SDT Waste & Debris truck from the company's Chalmette storage yard and dumping hundreds of gallons of portable-toilet waste into a Lower 9th Ward storm drain pleaded not guilty Wednesday in state district court in St. Bernard Parish.
Philip Barbarin, 32, faces a felony charge of unauthorized use of a vehicle. The St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office arrested him March 18, three days after SDT owner Sidney Torres IV reported the truck stolen.
Barbarin, of Gretna, is the same man Torres alleged last fall illegally dumped waste collected from SDT portable toilets into a City Park drain after the Voodoo Music Experience.
His next court appearance is set for July 21, with a trial set for Oct. 20 at the parish courthouse in Chalmette.
Women Caught With man in "Port-O-Potty" Violated Restraining Order, Says Police
PORTSMOUTH — A Mass. woman is being held on $1,000 cash bail after she was seen going into a “port-o-potty” with a man who had a restraining order against her, say police.
Beth Mackey, 25, of 88 Hancock Street, Braintree, was arraigned by video from the Rockingham County House of Corrections Thursday on a class A misdemeanor count of violating a protective order. According to an affidavit by Officer Timothy McCain, Mackey came to police attention on June 10 at 8:49 p.m. when a caller reported seeing a man and a woman enter a portable bathroom on a construction site at the old Lafayette School on Monroe Street.
“A passerby reported seeing a male and a female exit a parked car and enter the latrine together,” according to the affidavit. “Due to the time of night and the fact that the construction site was closed to the public, the reporting party believed this was suspicious in nature.”
The couple was found in a car matching the witness description near the construction site and identified as Mackey and a man from whom the district court prohibited her from contacting. Prosecutor Karl Durand said the no-contact order was issued May 29 after Mackey assaulted and bloodied the man with a telephone in a city hotel room.
McCain asked Mackey if she knew she was not supposed to be in contact with the man and she replied, “Yes but they had worked it out,” according to the officer’s report. Because police were unable to get a print copy of the restraining order, Mackey was not arrested at the scene, said Durand.
When a report became available 50 minutes later, officers found her in the same car with the alleged victim parked at a Route 1 Bypass gas station and she was arrested, according to police.
“When we were in the port-o-potty, we weren’t doing anything nasty,” Mackey told Judge Sawako Gardner. “I just had surgery and I was holding onto him. No one wants to fall into a port-o-potty.”
Noting Mackey was on bail and under court orders to have no contact with the alleged victim, the judge set her bail at $1,000 cash and $1,000 personal recognizance. She was also ordered to stay a minimum of 100 feet away from the alleged victim and to return to the court for a July 7 trial.
The Sharps say they live by the motto, "The money that's made in the company ... stays in the company."
When you work five stories high, a nearby toilet can be your best friend. But for Sharp's company, Comfort House, business isn't exactly, um, flowing like it did before the recession.
"We had 98 percent of our inventory out, with strong healthy prices," he told CNN. "With the boom in the production homes, that's what kept us busy."
The arena is one of the biggest projects in Florida with more than 400 construction workers on site. But the decline in construction, which was 95 percent of Comfort House's business, hit the company hard. It's been forced to lay off about a third of its staff, including some long-time employees. Hours have been cut back as well.
Now a sea of toilets sits unrented on the company's property. But it's not a sign of desperation, Sharp said.
"We didn't take on a large amount of debt. We paid cash for our assets," he said. The company owns its property outright, including all its portable toilets, vehicles and equipment.
That's part of the business model Sharp said his parents taught him, and it's helped this family business survive and ward off bottom feeders who see the toilets sitting unused and think he's desperate to be bought out at a fraction of the cost.
"Had we spent outside our means, had we grown and leveraged everything, financed everything, we'd be in a really tough situation," he said. "Good business model: Storing money, saving money when you make money ... keeping things simple."
Comfort House is a third-generation family business that started in the late 1960s. John Sharp Sr., the family patriarch, said he's acquired considerable wisdom from the three previous recessions that he and his company have survived.
"My boat is a 12-foot johnboat we use for duck hunting, and that's my yacht, and that's pretty much the extent of my extravagance," he told CNN. 
"So we kind of live by that motto that the money that's made in the company kinda stays in the company," he said.
But every company has its breaking point, and even with sound business principles and mechanics, the Sharps say, it's hard to tell how long they can last. This recession is by far the worst that the elder Sharp has seen.
"You don't know when it's gonna end," he explained.
"If you could tell me it's gonna end in six months, I could say, 'OK, here's my business plan,' but our business plan is that this could go on for another year or two," he said.
In many ways his son is getting a real-world crash course in "Recession 101."
"It's been a great learning lesson for me ... I'm very fortunate ... because this will carry me, hopefully, for the next 30 years plus," he said.
And while the Sharps are involved in a business that smells like anything but roses, John Sharp Jr. says as long as his toilets stay rented, they all smell like money.All will be played at Lincoln Financial Field. The 2009 game already had been scheduled for Dec. 12 at the Linc.
FedEx Field, in Landover, Md., will host the 2011 game, and the 2014 and 2016 games will be played at M & T Bank Stadium, in Baltimore.
Future games, beginning this season, will be played on the second Saturday in December. That moves Army-Navy from the traditional first Saturday of that month, which now generally serves as the date for conference championship games before the final Bowl Championship Series standings are announced.
CBS will continue to televise the game through 2018.
Philadelphia has hosted 81 of the 109 games played in the rivalry since it began in 1890, including 67 of the last 77.
The announcement made yesterday comes at the end of a nine-month bidding process.
Last August, the academies distributed a formal proposal request for cities to bid on future games. Official bids were submitted in the fall, with finalist cities hosting site visits in early 2009. Negotiations have been ongoing since.
"This bid was a collaboration between all of our great partners from the city, state, Eagles and our host committee," said Larry Needle, executive director of the Philadelphia Sports Congress. "Army-Navy is truly Philadelphia's 'Bowl Game,' and will remain that way for years to come."
According to the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, the game and surrounding events generate $35 million in total economic impact and more than 17,000 hotel-room nights for the region each year. *
DALLAS — A man accused of being the supplier in the overdose death of a Southern Methodist University student has been convicted on drug and weapons charges.
A federal jury in Dallas on Friday convicted 48-year-old James McDaniel.
Jurors decided the Dallas man provided cocaine, methamphetamine and oxycodone leading to the 2007 death of 21-year-old Meghan Bosch.
Her body was discovered in a portable toilet in Hewitt.
McDaniel was convicted of maintaining a drug-involved premise, possession with intent to distribute and distribution of cocaine, possession with intent to distribute and distribution of a controlled substance resulting in death, and two counts of possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime.
Sentencing is Sept. 8. McDaniel faces a maximum life prison term.
Two women testified that McDaniel also drugged them.
Also on Friday, a third woman told jurors McDaniel told her he had duped another woman into taking a depressant after the witness saw the woman unconscious on a bed at one of McDaniel’s poker rooms.
Prosecutors presented no evidence that McDaniel sexually assaulted any of the women.
In court documents, though, prosecutors have claimed McDaniel, 48, drugged and raped up to a dozen women.
Prosecutors say McDaniel, who had been on parole since 2001 after serving two decades in prison for killing a former Dallas police officer, targeted SMU students with his poker and cocaine operation. Bosch was one of them, prosecutors said.
McDaniel maintains he was not involved in Bosch’s death and denies he dealt drugs or committed any sexual assaults.
Testimony in the trial that began Tuesday has revealed that as many as 15 students a day were allegedly buying cocaine from McDaniel.
Young females, evidence has shown, were McDaniel’s focus, and he sought to gain their trust. He gave away cocaine and other drugs, according to testimony. McDaniel once loaned cash to a woman to pay her rent, her roommate said.
Two witnesses, a former Wade College design student in Dallas and a University of North Texas student, testified that McDaniel offered and gave them free cocaine. They each said that after ingesting it, they didn’t remember anything and awakened the next morning feeling disoriented.
Photo by Christopher Peterson/BuzzFoto.com
