Orange County, CA Public Conduct: Public Urination (2026)

Section 3-4-17(a) prohibits urinating, defecating, or otherwise discarding or disposing of human waste or excretion in an area exposed to the public view or in any public place, except inside a toilet receptacle within a restroom, bathroom or other enclosure. Because the article's definitions at section 3-4-15 apply throughout, public place is read broadly here too: it covers streets, sidewalks, parking lots and structures, school and athletic grounds, and the common areas and hallways of apartment buildings, condominiums, motels, hotels and homeowner associations, plus vehicles parked in any of those places, though it excludes a single-family home's front yard area up to the public right-of-way.

Subsection (b) builds in a medical defense: anyone who cannot control their excretory functions by reason of illness, infection, disease, disability or other infirmity is exempt from the ban, protecting people with incontinence, certain disabilities, or acute illness from prosecution. That exemption has a limit, though: it does not apply if the loss of control resulted from voluntarily drinking alcohol or using a substance the person was not legally allowed to possess or consume, so a person who is incapacitated from drugs or drinking cannot claim the medical defense.

Both section 3-4-16, public alcohol consumption, and section 3-4-17 were adopted together by Ordinance No. 00-12, section 1, on November 7, 2000, as Article 3 of Division 4, alongside the shared definitions in section 3-4-15, and both apply only within the unincorporated area of the County; incorporated cities such as Irvine and Huntington Beach handle public urination under their own municipal codes.