Waste of Taxpayer Money: Missoula to Spend Almost $100k on Public Bathroom in City Park
This expensive bathroom will be installed at Greenough Park.
The Missoula City Council voted unanimously on Monday to approve a contract that will allocate nearly $100,000 of taxpayer money for the purchase and installation of a public bathroom in a city park.
This new bathroom will be installed at Greenough Park, a 42-acre site.
The company that agreed to a contract with Missoula to undertake this project is CXT Incorporated, a Pennsylvania-based company. CXT Incorporated specializes in making pre-cast restrooms, showers and multipurpose buildings.
CXT Incorporated’s precast designs are all Americans with Disabilities Act compliant and withstand intense snow, fast winds and earthquakes.
According to the contract with the company, the installation of this bathroom will cost $93,966. Missoula has purchased the Tioga vault toilet, a double-vault style bathroom measuring 11 feet 11 inches by 14 feet 4 inches.
A vault toilet is a waterless toilet that stores waste in an underground tank.
The base price of this unit is $42,000; however, bringing it to Missoula and installing it will incur an additional cost of $51,966. The transportation cost to Missoula alone is $17,400.
According to the city council agenda item, this new restroom facility will replace a previous one at Greenough Park that was destroyed by a tree in 2015.
The park’s bathroom “suffered extensive damage that resulted” in its removal. Greenough Park has been using two port-a-lets seasonally at the southern Greenough Park trailhead since 2016.
Missoula did consider installing a restroom with plumbing, but it determined this “significantly increased project costs to reestablish utility connections.”
Missoula’s Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee voted to also unanimously approve this contract.
Garrick Swanson, a project manager for the city’s Parks and Recreation, noted in his presentation on June 25 that if the project is delayed, Missoula would have to spend even more of its taxpayer dollars to install a city bathroom.
“Park users will continue to have a reduced park experience without restroom services to support the trail, [picnic] shelter and playground,” he said.
Swanson said that this is a “typical bathroom” people would see in a national park or a state park.
This is not the first time Missoula has spent a significant amount of money building public bathrooms. In 2015, the city built a public restroom at West Bank Park, costing $200,000, which came in over budget.
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Zachery Schmidt is the founder of The Montana Chronicles. If you have any tips, please send them to montanachronicles@proton.me.