New Palmer toilets are good to go

PALMER — It took awhile. Quite awhile. But the city now has a sparkling new set of bathrooms in downtown.

“We are no longer depending on temporary toilets, messy and smelly, for our visitors,” City Manager Bill Allen said.

He said the bathrooms are essentially open for business, though there’s still some work to be done.

“We hired a landscape architect to go in and put on the Sunday best,” Allen said.

All told, said Palmer Public Works Director Carter Cole, the project will have cost the city between $240,000 and $250,000. He said that puts it in under budget; the city council gave him $310,911 to work with.

The city, like a number of Alaska communities, sees an influx of visitors in the summer. One estimate put the number of city visitors at 36,000. Until now, they had to use portables or facilities in the city’s visitor’s center, which were quickly overwhelmed when large tour buses pulled into town. Allen said in previous interviews that the city council had come to feel embarrassed at the lack of facilities and asked him to put up something permanent.

Both Allen and Cole chalked up the delay on the project — the council was working on the project earnestly as far back as last July, but it had been on the radar since at least September 2008 — to the city’s lack of a solid plan for capital improvements.

“I’m as much to blame for that as anyone,” Allen said.

He joked that the project was slow even judged against the glacial pace of government. Soviet Russia, he said, might have gotten it done sooner.

It’s a problem, he said, the city has recently worked to address. Just this past week, Allen said the city rolled out a capital improvement plan, which he said delineates the duties of the city’s administration and city council and lays out “who does what, when and then we stay out of each other’s way.”

When projects are slow to progress, Allen said, a community tends to forget what projects were approved. Rumors crop up. Indeed, he said, this project had some of that as it moved forward.

After the city started putting the building up, he said, a group of residents stopped by the site and started looking around.

“You’ve got running water in here?” one of them asked incredulously.

Apparently, Allen said, a rumor had been circulating that the city planned to put up a giant outhouse in the center of its downtown. There was even a nascent petition drive afoot to stop the outhouse project.

Cole said that the facility measures out at 28-by-25-feet, for a total square footage of around 700. It’s a prefabricated building that came in a kit that city workers then assembled. As far as maintenance goes, the building is designed for quick clean-up — just hose it down and you’re good to go.

He said that while it may have taken awhile to get the project through the political process and make sure everyone was on the same page, once his department had the green light the building went up relatively quickly.

“It was built within budget and it was built as cheap as possible utilizing city workers,” Cole said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.