Sounds like they are contracting with an outside vendor. The cost actually sounds reasonable to me. Would you be able to clean and refill the water in a portable toilet for $115,000 a year?
This appears to be one of those situations where the people demanding a service don’t think about the cost, only their benefits.
We have a septic tank. The guy comes out with his truck, puts the hose in, flips the on switch, a few minutes later flips the off switch. Drives away to the dump site. A little port-a-potty would empty in less than a minute.
Yep - reasonable cost for those standards - the question is whether the toilet needs to be there.
https://www.fixr.com/costs/portable-toilets
Based on the information at the link, the weekly cost of a standard port-a-potty would be about $800 (the twice daily service adds a lot to the cost). The estimate is about $260/week including 2 services, each additional service adds $45. A deluxe potty would add roughly another $200 or so, but a long-term contract would get you a better price than a weekly one.
800 x 52 = $41.6K
I wonder if someone on the Austin city council has a brother-in-law in the sanitation business.
One toilet is good for a crew of 10 for a week. A single porta potty in an urban setting may need cleanout daily. They aren’t always cleaned up on site, sometimes pulled and replaced to clean up at the yard.
I rented some over the summer. To send a cleanout truck midweek was $50. I think the cost to rent 5 of them was about $400
They might find that placing multiple units at the same site is almost the same cost.