PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson Transit will spend up to $182,000 to install new unisex restrooms at the district’s Haines Place Transit Center by July 31.
The facility at 440 12th St., is the main pick-up and drop-off point for the increasingly utilized transit authority.
The public transportation benefit area saw 253,000 rides taken on its vehicles in 2018, a 7.6 percent increase over 2017, transit board commissioners learned at their Tuesday meeting.
Board members set wheels in motion for the restroom project Tuesday, unanimously agreeing to install them at the transit center just as the nearby Port of Port Townsend’s Boat Haven bathrooms and showers closed to the general public Feb. 15.
Transit board members approved buying a $73,681 prefabricated, two-stall restroom through the state Department of Enterprise Services Cooperative Purchasing Program and approved a $52,983 project management agreement with J.E. Gibson Engineering and Consulting of Tenino.
“This is something we’ve been asked to and needed to do for a long time,” said transit board member David Sullivan, one of three county commissioners on the transit board.
The new bathrooms will replace a single-stall restroom now available to bus riders that a transit employee said Tuesday was so uninviting that bus riders are steered away from it and headed to the Safeway across the street.
“The one in the little building we purchased there really isn’t robust enough to handle public use,” Sullivan said at the meeting.
“What we are trying to do is provide better comfort stations for our riding public,” General Manager Tammi Rubert added Thursday.
“It is a basic need.”
A crane operator will lower the two-stall facility, which will include sinks and be unheated, onto a concrete slab near the transit center administrative office, which has its own rest room.
“It comes in one big, large concrete piece,” Rubert told the commissioners.
Additional construction costs will include laying a concrete slab for the building, Rubert said, adding those costs will determine if the project stays on budget.
Sullivan said the new facility will at least partially address the closure of the port facilities.
Access to the Boat Haven showers and restrooms was restricted solely for port tenants due to vandalism and to transients sleeping in the shower area, port Interim Executive Director Jim Pivarnik said Wednesday.
Showers are $1 for 3 minutes.
“Guests do not want to walk in to take a shower and have homeless people sleeping in them,” Pivarnik said, adding that the port still has general-public bathrooms at Larry Scott Trail.
Transit board member David Faber, also deputy mayor of Port Townsend, asked at the meeting Tuesday if the new restrooms can be added onto, which they can’t, Rubert said.
“What we will be seeing is a lot of spill-over effect from the port closure and a lot of sink showers taken” in the new transit center restrooms, Faber predicted.
“We do need somewhere in our community, writ large, for public shower facilities.”
Pivarnik said more than 20,000 showers a year were being taken at the Boat Haven facility, far exceeding usage solely by port tenants.
“A lot of people used this as an in-town shower,” Pivarnik said.
“A lot of people who live off the grid, professional people who don’t have running water, they come here and shower.
“It’s interesting seeing very nicely dressed people with towels rolled up going in and taking a shower.”
Transit board member Kate Dean, also the county commissioners’ chairwoman, was satisfied with the new transit center facility being confined to its intended use.
“I don’t think it needs to serve all purposes,” Dean said.
Rubert said the new Transit Center restrooms were already budgeted for 2019 when the port decided to restrict access to the Boat Haven restrooms and showers.
“We’ve been talking about this for quite awhile,” she said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
