Burlington, NC Public Conduct: Public Urination (2026)

City Code § 23-5, Public decency, makes it unlawful for any person to urinate or defecate upon street rights-of-way, all other city property, and the real or personal property of another person, firm or corporation in the city without that party's express consent. The section draws a clean line rather than listing exceptions for circumstance: the only carve-out is for using an actual toilet, privy or other receptacle intended for that purpose, so the rule reaches any outdoor act on public or private land the person doesn't have consent to use that way, from sidewalks and parking lots to a neighbor's yard.

Subsection (b) sets the penalty directly in the section rather than relying on article 23's general penalty clause elsewhere in the chapter: a violation is a Class 3 misdemeanor, and a conviction carries a fine of fifty dollars or imprisonment for up to thirty days, or both, under G.S. § 14-4, the state's general misdemeanor penalty statute for city ordinance violations, and G.S. § 160A-175, the state authority letting cities criminalize ordinance violations as misdemeanors. Because the offense is charged criminally rather than through a civil citation, it is prosecuted in court rather than resolved through the nonjudicial administrative hearing process available for many of Burlington's civil-penalty ordinances, and a conviction leaves a criminal record.

The ordinance sits in chapter 23's Article II, alongside other public-order rules such as the ban on playing ball or throwing objects in the street, and was last amended in 2022 alongside a batch of chapter 23 penalty updates.