Porta Potty Rental in Lawrence, MA 01841

Lawrence is the clearest two-office city in this group, and the City says so itself. On the container side, the City publishes that any dumpster larger than 6 cubic yards needs a permit from the Fire Prevention Bureau under the state fire code, costing $50 for up to three months and requiring the supplier's contact details and a plot plan of the proposed position. That permit is written about waste containers by capacity, so it does not reach a portable restroom. What matters to you is the sentence immediately after it: containers placed on the street or public way require a permit to obstruct from inspectional services. That is the limb a restroom in a Lawrence street falls under, and the full regulation set sits on the City's dumpster requirements page.

The codified ordinance names different offices again, and both answers are worth having. In the City's own code, a permit to break or dig up the ground, erect staging for a building, or deposit building materials in a street comes from the city council. A separate clause covering anyone who places or leaves any article, material or merchandise in a sidewalk, street or highway routes that permit to the director of the police department for city ways. So the published administrative route and the codified route point at Fire Prevention, Inspectional Services, the council and the police between them. In practice we start with Inspectional Services, because that is the office the City's own current guidance names, and the City switchboard is 978-620-3000.

Then come the conditions on the permit, and in Lawrence they are physical rather than financial. Where a permit to obstruct a street or sidewalk is issued, the holder must enclose the obstruction with a proper fence and keep it lighted at night for pedestrian safety, must leave the ground clear of debris when the occupancy ends, and where the obstruction lasts more than 15 days must lay and maintain a plank walkway around it, built of two-inch planks on heavy joists, not less than four feet wide, running entirely around the obstruction and connected to the sidewalk at each end by an easy grade. Those duties fall on the permit holder, so settle who that is before you order.

On private ground, no Lawrence permit is published for a portable restroom. A unit on a lot, inside a yard or within a fenced site is site equipment. Note separately that Lawrence's own setback rules for containers keep them 20 feet from an intersection and 10 feet from a fire hydrant, and those are sensible positions for a restroom too even where they do not strictly bind it.

One limitation to state. Lawrence's code is readable at chapter level but its title-level pages serve no text at all, so the chapters quoted above were read individually. Nothing here rests on a page that came back empty.