When you gotta go, where to go? The crappy state of Colorado’s public restrooms

By Nancy Lofholm. Special to The Colorado Sun (Via AP Storyshare)

Nature calls. But what if there is no answer?

Colorado’s public outdoor bathrooms are vanishing. Where once there might have been inviting brick-and-mortar restrooms, the public is often finding padlocked doors or a head-scratching void: “I could have sworn there used to be a bathroom here.”

Lavatories are disappearing because bathrooms in parks and downtowns have morphed from a public convenience to a public nuisance. All manner of gross and sometimes dangerous items are being left in restrooms. The structures themselves have become targets for destruction. And what better hiding places are there for quick illegal acts?

Visit a public lavatory and it’s possible to stumble upon hypodermic needles, used condoms, blood (real and fake), gang graffiti, campers, sink bathers, ripped-off stall doors, dirty underwear, smashed-to-bits toilets and sinks, fentanyl, feces and urine on the floors or even the walls, broken glass, bodies.

So, up go the padlocks. Or, in some cases, down go the entire “comfort station” buildings.

A porta potty is serviced next to the public restroom, with doors locked, at the Dos Rios Park, April 4, 2024, in Grand Junction. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

Public officials and potty promoters have been left trying to solve the conundrum of how to provide a basic, needed public service in facilities that have become magnets for vandalism and crime.

“It’s just a travesty. It’s not something that should be happening,” said Steve Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association.

Yes, there is indeed a restroom association formed to push against the loss of loos. There is also a World Toilet Organization. It’s a global nonprofit that holds a World Toilet Summit and a World Toilet Day in a quest to push for more public places to go.

The problem is overwhelming, particularly in the proverbial land of plenty.

As restrooms disappear, portable toilets fill the void

The U.S. has just eight public toilets per 100,000 people. That’s on par with Botswana and way behind Iceland, which has 56 public toilets per 100,000, according to the Public Toilet Index, a 2021 study by a British bathroom supply company.

The study shows Colorado in the top quarter of states with regard to numbers of public restrooms. Colorado has 22 per 100,000 residents.

No comprehensive statistics have yet been tallied in Colorado for how many public bathrooms are going away due to the aforementioned problems or how many taxpayer dollars have been wasted on bathrooms that are no longer safe places to go.

But let’s use Grand Junction as an example.

There are about two dozen public restrooms in Grand Junction’s city parks. But half a dozen of those have been shut down and will remain that way because of the glut of problems, a city parks official says. Another half-dozen are closed for now, but may be reopened with some restrictions and oversight as park use goes up in the summer.

One large downtown restroom, unveiled with fanfare several decades ago, has been scraped from the corner of a parking lot just off Main Street. The empty space is now wrapped in a construction-zone fence as city officials await a high-tech, self-cleaning modular toilet that is literally coming on a slow boat from New Zealand.

In city parks, tan plastic portable toilets — the kind you might find at a music festival — are filling the void. They have been parked outside the shuttered restrooms that cost upward of half a million dollars each to build. The newest padlocked bathroom, a tidy concrete and brick building at Dos Rios Park, was only about two years old when it was locked up.

Brenda Ripley was shaking the door handle there recently to make sure it was really locked. Ripley, a physical therapist who had just moved back to Grand Junction, had two toddlers who needed to use a bathroom while playing in the adjacent park. She didn’t want to try to cram them into the portable potty so she cut play time short.

She had gotten used to locked bathrooms while living in California for the past decade but didn’t expect to find them at a new facility in Grand Junction.

“I’m surprised,” she said as she hustled her kids toward their SUV.

Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout shared the same surprise when she was walking on the Colorado Riverfront Trail and decided to make a pit stop at Dos Rios.

“Nope. It was locked,” she found.

That got her thinking about a vexing municipal dilemma.

“How do we meet needs and balance the need to relieve oneself against the equally important need not to have taxpayer dollars wasted and to prevent unwanted behavior in the bathrooms?” she wondered. “This is one of those challenges with very few solutions that will make everyone happy.”

Work never ends for Grand Junction’s “bathroom guy”

Grand Junction has one person in particular working on the problem. The city’s parks superintendent, Randy Coleman, has earned the nickname “the bathroom guy” for tackling the problem of public toilets.

A passing cyclist uses the porta potty next to the public restroom, with doors locked, at the Dos Rios Park, April 4, 2024, in Grand Junction. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

“Vandalism is the biggest problem. People break the toilets. They rip out the wiring. They set fires. Anything you can imagine, they do,” said the frustrated bathroom guy. Coleman estimated that repairs for much of that vandalism can cost upward of $30,000 for each damaged unit. Some are repaired only to be damaged anew.

That all adds up to, pardon our French, a s—tpile of money.

“The most difficult thing for us,” Coleman said, “is fulfilling our commitment to providing a service when we see the same things happening over and over.”

Greg Mikolai, mayor of the neighboring town of Palisade, is wrestling with the same conundrum.

Palisade is currently removing a bathroom from its Riverbend Park, where attendees from across the state gather each year to celebrate peaches and wine.

The bathroom was run down, and it was being vandalized during quiet times when festivalgoers are not packing the park. Putting money into refurbishing it or building a new facility just like it was not going to work, given the mounting privy problems.

“It’s crazy crap,” Mikolai said without irony. “We have to come up with different solutions.”

Palisade has been trying one solution at another park — an Urben Blu self-cleaning washroom from Canada. So far, the sleek, shiny white bathroom cube at Palisade’s Veterans’ Memorial Park has been an improvement over the traditional restroom that sat in that space.

The restroom welcomes users with a recorded voice that spells out rules: no unaccompanied children, and a 20-minute time limit. A timer unlocks the door if a user lingers longer than that. Following every 10 to 15 uses, the unit locks itself and a sprinkler comes on to disinfect and clean the interior.

The whole unit, right down to the commode and sink, is made of vandal-resistant, fiber-reinforced concrete and galvanized steel.

Grand Junction also plans to get into techie toilet mode by installing a New Zealand-made modular, self-cleaning toilet called the Exeloo — the same facility that won the city of Colorado Springs top billing in America’s Best Bathroom contest in 2020. The new loo will be placed on the downtown corner where the large showcase bathroom once stood.

That unit, which will cost more than $300,000 to buy and install, will be used as a sort of tourist attraction and public-education privy, Coleman said.

“It could be the best thing since sliced bread,” he said. “We just don’t know yet.” In the meantime, city workers are building half a dozen trendy-looking, rusty corrugated metal enclosures that will wrap around ugly, utilitarian plastic portable-toilet units. The enclosures solve the eyesore of portable bathrooms in manicured parks.

A worldwide shortage, and a host of potential solutions

The Grand Valley represents just a drop in the worldwide bucket of public toilet quandaries and the methods to try to deal with them.

The Boulder Public Library is seen on Feb. 6, 2023. The library’s public bathrooms were closed after methamphetamine was detected in the restrooms and on tables. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Germany has renovated and repositioned public bathrooms near bus shelters and newsstands, making them easier to find. In its capital city, The Berliner Toilette app maps out the closest facilities when nature calls. Berlin also partnered with a furniture company to increase the number of public bathrooms from 256 to 418. Users pay a small fee for the privilege of relieving themselves in the public facilities.

Singapore has been pushing public bathroom awareness by bestowing annual LOO — Let’s Respect Ourselves — awards for the best bathroom cleaners.

Tokyo has taken an arty approach by installing glowing public bathrooms with see-through walls that turn opaque when a user enters.

China started a so-called Toilet Revolution nearly a decade ago that has so far resulted in 68,000 toilets being built with a government directive that they be kept clean.

London introduced the Community Toilet Scheme two years ago that pays shop and restaurant owners a small fee to put a sticker on windows showing that their bathrooms are open to the public.

Paris added 435 new self-cleaning toilets in the past year, creating the largest network of self-cleaning toilets in the world.

San Francisco has grappled with the problem with a variety of solutions, from installing self-cleaning toilet units to stationing attendants at more traditional public bathrooms.

Portland has become known for its homegrown public restroom design called the Portland Loo, which have steel-panel walls and open grates at the top and bottom so it is possible to see how many people are inside. The units can be sprayed out with a hose for cleaning.

The city of Denver has kicked off the Denver Public Restrooms Pilot Project with a mixture of public restrooms designed to deter crime and vandalism. Some of the city’s fancier public facilities, like one at Commons Park, have been locked and portable potties parked nearby.

Denver has also tried the high-tech mode with a public bathroom on Champa Street that, like Palisade’s New Zealand loo, has a recorded voice welcoming users and warning they have only 10 minutes to do their business. It has the added feature of playing elevator music — possibly in an attempt to hurry users along. An attendant watches over that facility.

In the U.S., women helped abolish “pay toilets”

According to historians, ancient Rome had the first public restrooms.

Debates over public restrooms have played out since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it dawned on public health leaders that having available bathroom facilities was key in promoting good hygiene and halting the spread of disease.

By the middle of the 20th century, public toilets were fa irly common. But many of them operated on the same principle as parking meters. It required a few coins for the right to sit on a loo.

That presented a parity problem. Urinals were free. Toilets were not. Gender bias in public restrooms became a cause.

Women in the late 1960s and ’70s complained that this toilet inequity was sexist. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America succeeded in getting pay commodes banned. Los Angeles was the first U.S. city to ban the toilets in 1970. But that had an unintended consequence. Public restrooms began disappearing as cities removed them rather than fight the gender battle and have to pay more for public facilities.

In the 1980s, more restrooms were removed because public toilets became places for unhoused people to take shelter. A toilet facility could be a cozy capsule to overnight in, as well as a place to try to wash up.

That practice has continued to this day, although officials are not blaming unhoused people for the explosion of toilet woes. People who are homeless represent just one piece of an issue that also extends to social media, Coleman said.

The “Public restrooms prank” is a trend where TikTok users are goaded into squirting Hershey’s chocolate sauce around toilets or spreading Nutella on restroom floors and walls. TikTok bathroom vandalism shows graphic graffiti, fixtures torn from walls and needles jabbed into toilet paper rolls.

While the American Restroom Association, the International Toilet Organization and practically every city of any size grapples with the problem, Grand Junction City Council member Scott Beilfuss pointed out that the subject of public bathrooms “is not a very popular topic” for local politicians.

“It’s a gigantic need. We all know that,” Beilfuss admitted.

A portable restroom is wrapped by corrugated metal for better appearance at Pine Ridge Park in Grand Junction. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

Soifer, of the American Restroom Association, noted that his organization is pushing for local action because, so far, attempts to get national action on public bathroom accessibility have gone nowhere. He calls what needs to happen — no pun intended, he says — “a bottom-up effort.”

“The public has to complain before officials act,” Soifer said.

“We honestly have to go to the nearest gas stations”

There is some public action stirring in Grand Junction. Dr. Paul Padyk has started a nonprofit called Toilet Equity that is trying to place compost toilets around town.

The basic painted plywood structures have gone up in several locations, but Coleman said they aren’t a widespread answer right now because in many places, city bylaws don’t allow for bathrooms that lack plumbing.

Beilfuss is a fan of the Toilet Equity effort and for bringing the bathroom topic to the forefront of city council issues.

So is Grand Junction City Council member Cody Kennedy, who has seen the growing bathroom problem from the inside out as an enforcer turned policymaker. He spent 17 years as a city police officer where he was privy to the worst in public bathrooms.

Kennedy was on a case in 2019 when an unsuspecting member of the public tried to use the Riverfront facilities that were popular with bicyclists and stroller-pushing walkers who needed to take a break. He found a blood-soaked body with several bullet holes slumped in a stall.

There have been other bodies found in public bathrooms in Grand Junction — from suicides, overdoses and natural causes. Those bathroom deaths are horrific, but Coleman said everyday ongoing problems are centered on vandalism.

“Vandalism is the biggest reason these bathrooms can’t be used,” he said.

The whole problem saddens Brionna Moravec of Silt. On a recent spring day, she drove a van load of special needs clients to Grand Junction to visit the butterfly pavilion near the bathroom where the murder occurred. She found it locked, but was not surprised. She has encountered this before as she takes clients on field trips.

“We honestly have to go to the nearest gas stations,” she said. “It’s tough because some of our people are in wheelchairs. They can’t get in there,” she said, pointing to a portable toilet parked outside the bathroom.

“It’s so sad. It’s so unfortunate,” Kennedy said. “Why in the world do people want to damage these nice facilities?” He added: “We face a tough balance. How do we have accountability and responsibility and usability with what we have going on that is just not healthy?”

If Kennedy comes up with an answer to that, the restroom association would like to hear it.