MORE ABOUT THE PUBLIC TOILET PLAN at the Council Meeting of 11 December, by Marcus Wigan

An issue that has been running for Eaglemont for a number of decades is the lack of a public toilet in the Eaglemont Village. All efforts to get a positive response have failed, and the new public toilet policy did not even include it as a target for a public toilet for the full ten years that it covered.

The background for the policy found that activity centres would be neglected if a toilet was not available - and that 500-600m was the walkable distance at which this became apparent. The impact on the elderly area of Eaglemont is clear.

So what could be done? Press VicRail to make their toilet available to the public? That's against their statewide policy and zero progress has been made for a very long time indeed, yet the current plan is to advocate for access to this toilet.

The answer is clear to me: there is no multipurpose meeting place in the Village or nearby, in fact the lack of even a noticeboard has had a marked effect on reducing the knowledge and thus responses to the toilet policy (or indeed other council surveys and proposals), and yet Eaglemont has plentiful people who would quickly inject activity and life into the village if such a facility was put in place. Of course this would include a public toilet - and a place for council information etc.

There is of course an obvious location, the blanked off shopfront beside Cristou’s real estate office. Well placed, empty, and - after some decades amply justifiably fundable by council as it would not only inject life into the area and also provide the missing toilet into the now identified required range for the many elderly (who also need a toilet much more than younger people, a factor ignored for so long) - and also a place for council information and the meetings that would then be readily held there.

Sadly I failed entirely, in the only 2 minutes I was allowed to speak, to convince the Councillors and to communicate these three linked issues and the multiple problems that would be addressed with multiple benefits.

One councillor commented that when I explained the three closely connected issues afterwards - and the data in the toilet policy that further supported the proposal - that this had not been clear, and perhaps I might have been able to persuade a positive vote.

We have not finished yet!