Lack Of Loos An Urgent Issue
By Randy Gaddo
Picture a beautiful September day with cool breezes that offer people a first break from the sweltering summer. Family X decides to have a cookout at the local picnic area.
The whole family shows up—from the newest infant to the grandparents and older aunts and uncles. They reserve the shelter and buy charcoal, hot dogs, and drinks. They gather, throw a Frisbee, play bocce ball; they eat, drink, and are merry.
Then Grandma says she has to go to the bathroom—now! The others suddenly realize there isn’t a restroom nearby. The closest one is across a bridge—a 10-minute walk. Grandma’s not going to make it, and the baby needs a diaper change as well.
This scenario happens more often than you might think. Across the country, there is a shortage of clean, well-maintained, available, and accessible public restrooms in parks and other public places.
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
Not only is the shortage causing inconvenience to park users; it also creates health and safety issues when desperate people who can’t find an open public restroom decide to go back to nature and use trees or bushes or city streets for their waste deposit; ugly, but it happens, especially in areas with homeless populations.
All over the country—indeed, all over the world—in the past couple of decades there have been countless documented reports of major brouhahas caused by a lack of sufficient outdoor public restrooms. According to “SHOTS: Health News From NPR,” some 2.5-billion people lack clean, safe bathrooms most of these, no doubt, in developing, third-world places. However, the U.S. has its share of potty nightmares.
In Anchorage, Alaska, there are more than 200 parks and hundreds of miles of trails, but according to a May 2016 article in the Anchorage Daily News, only about 100 of them have a public restroom nearby, mostly in the form of port-a-potties, and they are generally removed in September to avoid freezing and reduce costs.
Also, port-a-potties are not even considered for use in many places due to what people do in, and to the plastic structures: illicit drug use, vandalism, tipping, burning, and worse.
Permanent restroom structures are more appealing but often can suffer the same treatment as their plastic cousins. “Build it and they will come” is an often-heard axiom in public buildings, and restrooms are no exception. Most stand-alone restroom facilities with sufficient capacity to serve a given park patronage will cost $200,000 or more, and will require ongoing maintenance. And the same people who misuse, abuse, vandalize, or destroy the port-a-potties have no qualms about doing the same to brick-and-mortar structures.
Park restroom hours of operation are often not in touch with the needs of the wide variety of patronage. It is often more staff- and cost-effective to keep restrooms open during normal working hours; however, many people use parks at different times due to unconventional working hours or training regimens. Keeping restrooms open beyond normal working hours also requires additional maintenance, cleaning, and restocking—thus more expense.
However, regardless of the structure of park restrooms or the hours of operation, they have to be maintained and that will normally fall on the shoulders of the maintenance crews. This is an important job because proper care and cleaning of public restrooms not only is aesthetically desirable but can also contribute to public health.
The Cost Of Contamination
For example, San Diego, Calif., has in recent years experienced a serious outbreak of Hepatitis A. Yet a San Diego Union-Tribune review of public records reported that, since 2000, four grand jury reports emphasized the shortage of public toilets and the concurrent risks of human waste on city streets, especially related to the city’s growing homeless population.
Hepatitis A is a highly contagious liver infection caused by that virus. It usually spreads when a person unknowingly ingests the virus from objects, food, or drinks contaminated by small, undetected amounts of stool from an infected person. Public restrooms that are not properly and frequently disinfected can be an obvious source.
San Diego city officials, including parks and rec professionals, were faced with the same conundrum that other small and large communities face when providing clean public-restroom capacity: the need was much greater than their staffing and budgets could accommodate.
However, in one San Diego community, the tenacity of a nonprofit organization brought a much-needed, relatively low-maintenance restroom to a small but heavily trafficked park. La Jolla, Calif., is a modern seaside community on the northwestern fringe of San Diego. With the Pacific Ocean as its western border, La Jolla is an attractive place to live or visit.
Longtime La Jolla resident Mary (Coakley) Munk and her husband felt the same way when they moved to La Jolla years ago and enjoyed Kellogg Park across the street from her home. In 2000, when someone showed her a preliminary plan for a restroom that was to go into the park, she became involved.
“The plan showed them building a large building with 5,000 square feet of concrete around it and showers out in the middle of the park,” recalls Munk, who is chairperson of the La Jolla Shores Association Parks and Beaches Committee. “None of it made any sense, so I started visiting every completed restroom I could with my ¼-inch scale drafting paper, camera, and measuring tape.”
She traveled at her own expense throughout California and neighboring states, seeking the perfect restroom.
Munk is not an architect or engineer or builder. She obtained her layman’s experience in all these fields on-the-job acting as “general contractor” while expanding her and her husband’s home in Minnesota earlier in her life. She applied that experience, along with common sense, when she volunteered to work with the San Diego Parks and Rec Department and a few other volunteers on the Kellogg Park restroom.
“I was working with two architects in the area who would take my drawings and give them to their interns to produce scaled drawings so we’d have something to work with,” she says. Eventually, the design was approved and the restroom was completed in 2005. A 750-square-foot building that was 10 feet high at its tallest point was constructed, as opposed to the originally proposed 2,000-square-foot, 14-foot-tall building.
A Unique Design
The restroom was built with low maintenance in mind. Being smaller certainly made it easier to clean, but so did many aspects of the actual construction. First, toilets and fixtures were stainless steel—the same material used in prisons. Concrete floors received special treatments to make them easier to clean and color for added appeal. All was “spray and wash” for easy cleaning.
A unique design features two rows of several unisex toilets each and two ADA stalls at the end; each toilet is in a separate, walled stall, with lockable doors facing outside, and a plumbing chase down the middle between the two rows. Not only did this facilitate easier maintenance access on the fixtures, but it also contributed to reducing the facility’s footprint, while still allowing for a 110-square-foot storage room at the end of the building.
Having a lockable door on each room provides a higher level of safety than the more open design of most restrooms. Munk refers to the traditional design as a “gang” restroom, where there is a common entrance that splits into separate men’s and women’s sides. “You never know who is around the side of that wall as you go around it,” she says. “It is much safer to go into the outside door into a separate room and lock it behind you.”
Daniel Daneri, San Diego Parks and Rec District Manager, notes that the individual stalls also facilitate maintenance since they can be cleaned individually instead of closing down the entire facility. However, he says, “It takes a bit more time because of the increased wall and door areas. The graffiti coating on the walls has helped but with individual spaces with locking doors, people have privacy to do as they please with their Sharpies, paint, etc.”
Daneri says that the individual stalls are being put into some other facilities, but not all because they can be an issue when people lock themselves in to sleep or do other nefarious deeds.
There are other unintended consequences to individual stalls, which require considerable ventilation to eliminate odors. The roof is offset and partially open to the elements to provide that ventilation, and as a result toilet paper rolls can get wet or even unravel in high wind. “I’m not sure how you would address this issue without ventilation fans instead of a partially opened roof,” Daneri says.
One very different feature was that sinks were placed outside the stalls on the building’s exterior walls. This is now a trend that is also being seen elsewhere. Putting sinks inside a restroom often encourages homeless people to use the sinks as body- and laundry-washing stations. Keeping sinks in the open also makes them available to people who do not have to use the bathroom. Cleaning can be accomplished by spraying them down with hoses.
The facility also features outside showers along the seashore promenade, where people can rinse sand off before using the restroom.
The restroom is also vandalism-resistant, using anti-graffiti coatings on exterior surfaces. Daneri says that using anti-graffiti paint on the inside of the doors would be helpful as well.
Munk notes that the San Diego Parks and Rec Department maintenance staff does a good job of cleaning the restrooms in the morning and again in early afternoon to pick up and re-stock toilet paper. However, she says if they could clean one more time between 7 and 10 p.m., it would cut down cleaning time in the morning.
She says the department has experienced budgetary cuts in recent years, and the maintenance section has suffered because of the cuts. “The recreation maintenance crew is down to bare bones,” she says.
Munk is also a past-president of the American Restroom Association (www.americanrestroom.org), a nonprofit that exists as an advocate for clean, safe, well-designed public restrooms. The website has many resources available to help with the design of reduced-maintenance restrooms.
“I would have to move ease of maintenance up the priority list when it comes to constructing new or renovating existing facilities,” Munk says. “Reduced maintenance can be designed into a facility but, unfortunately, many architects have no experience designing modern restrooms so they fall back on the old designs that are inherently larger, more unsafe, and more maintenance-intensive.”
Over the past couple decades, other ideas have emerged for low-maintenance restroom facilities. From stainless-steel “self-cleaning” toilets to portable toilets on wheels, all the ideas have met with varying levels of success.
This is not an easy issue to deal with. If money and staffing were not factors, then all parks and rec departments would have 24/7, fully staffed restrooms at all their facilities. By their very nature, restrooms are high-maintenance facilities, and while they are all different, there is one common variable—at some point, their success or failure depends on how well they are maintained because, let’s face it—a stinky, dirty toilet probably won’t get used much.
Randy Gaddo, a retired Marine who also served for 15 years in municipal parks and recreation, is now a full-time photojournalist who lives in Bay Minette, Ala. He can be reached at (678) 350-8642 or email cwo4usmc@comcast.net.