Report on need for public toilets in Anchorage shows continued reluctance to pay for them

In April, Anchorage voters decisively rejected a proposal to spend $5 million on a program to bring 10 new portable toilets to the city. In the aftermath of that vote, backers commissioned research and a large survey to figure out viable alternatives to deal with the city’s persistent bathroom shortage.

This month, the results were published. Many people reported needing a bathroom while out around town, but said existing options were sufficient and they didn’t feel public financing for improvements was worth pursuing.

A $50,000 appropriation from the Anchorage Assembly paid for a contractor, Huddle AK, to conduct the survey and produce a report on the issue as part of the Anchorage Areawide Public Restroom Project.

“We wanted to learn more why the bond did not pass,” states the restroom project’s website.

The research also aims to offer a different set of options, because despite the bond failing, the city’s bathroom problems remain.

Anchorage has few public restrooms. Other than rented port-a-potties that appear seasonally, there are few places for tourists, parents and kids at playgrounds, pedestrians, trail users, people who are homeless or others to easily duck into when nature calls. The city pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the private company Rent-A-Can for portable toilets to meet some of that need. Business owners have complained of their establishments becoming the de facto option for people to relieve themselves, regardless of if they are customers. Property owners regularly complain to their elected officials about finding human waste in places it should not be.

But 61% of voters said no to the Assembly’s proposal to bond for 10 units called “Portland Loos” specifically designed for urban restroom needs, including elements to deter drug-use, squatting and vandalism. The money would have also paid for their upkeep over several years, a factor that proponents said was missing from conversations about the real costs of maintaining public infrastructure.

The online survey conducted by Huddle AK ran for just under a month over the summer and received 4,275 responses. Though 72% of respondents said that at some point they’d needed a bathroom while out and about in Anchorage, 54% of that same segment said that “a public restroom was readily available,” according to the final report.

A majority of survey respondents, 58%, said the municipality does not need more public bathrooms, and roughly the same share, 59%, said they “would not support publicly funded restroom projects in the future.”

“Generally, respondents appeared apprehensive of the cost of construction and maintenance of public restroom facilities,” the report states. “The majority of respondents felt the current Rent-A-Can system used throughout the Municipality meets the current restroom needs of the public. Primary reservations stem from fears of misuse of facilities and general funding concerns.”

The number of port-a-potties in the city fluctuates seasonally. In summer, the Parks and Recreation Department pays for 144 to be placed and regularly serviced throughout the municipality, though over winter that number dips down to just 26 along popular trails, playgrounds and park areas. Since 2018, taxpayers in Anchorage have spent between $264,193 and $470,852 a year on port-a-potties, for a total of $2,413,450 in less than six years, according to the analysis in Huddle AK’s report.

The document also compiled a map of the places respondents most wanted to see public facilities, and weighted them against a few other criteria to assert where the need for restrooms is greatest. The top five, in order, are shown to be near Westchester Lagoon, along the Campbell Creek greenbelt, at Kincaid Park by the chalet parking lot, at Far North Bicentennial Park’s Bivouac Trailhead, and at Ruth Arcand Park off Abbott Road.

“This is all information that we need,” said Assembly Chair Christopher Constant, one of the primary backers of the bathroom bond. “We will definitely continue to work on this issue … we have no toilets in this community for people to use.”

Constant said voters made clear that a significant majority of them did not support the earlier proposition, but he and others plan to keep looking for a solution to the bathroom shortage. The new report is not a road map for a new course of action, he said, but a responsible consideration of different options for city leaders to evaluate moving forward.

“This study was supposed to be done before the election,” Constant said. He thinks that if there’d been more information gathered ahead of the ballot measure going before voters in April, it would have been designed in a way that would have earned more support.

Constant asserted that while the survey collected a large number of responses, the sample is not representative of the city as a whole. Respondents skewed older, and a disproportionately high share were from the South Anchorage district, which tends to be wealthier and slightly more conservative than other parts of town. It’s not clear if an article that ran on a conservative website this summer directing its readers to fill out the survey tilted results.

The report looks at several different companies producing modern public toilets, and prices out what units from each would cost to purchase, install and maintain. None are inexpensive. Most of the options are in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars once construction, utility and maintenance costs are all factored in — about the same price budgeted for the 10 Portland Loos models the bond proposition would have purchased.

Constant said even though many balk at the sticker price, residents are already paying for the issue, whether it’s in the form of contracts for port-a-potties, higher prices from private businesses that have to clean restrooms more frequently, or bodily waste left on sidewalks and in building alcoves.

“We need more bathrooms. People having to poop outside: not acceptable,” he said.

Though the report is public, Constant said the Assembly has not yet had a briefing or work session on it to begin considering next steps.