By Anne Higuera
Reporting for West Seattle Blog
Finding a clean, open, and safe restroom in Seattle city parks is, for lack of a better word, a crapshoot. That’s the blunt conclusion of a City Auditor report issued earlier this month, documenting a number of failures around maintenance and access to potties in the parks. West Seattle parks fare no better than the rest. As of this writing, half of District 1’s 26 restrooms are closed for a variety of reasons, some expected and some not.
The auditor’s report (read it here), covering operations in 2023 and 2024, will be discussed by a City Council committee tomorrow. More on that later. First: The report details a confluence of circumstances that contributed to not meeting Parks’ goals around cleanliness and availability, despite almost doubling the parks tax levy in 2023. A hiring freeze in 2024 was the primary culprit, but an increase in vandalism, inconsistent/unenforced standards, and lack of data collection have added up to a situation where managers don’t know if bathrooms have been cleaned, or how much, and the public often can’t tell if the restrooms are usable, let alone open, until they arrive. Improvements are now promised for 2025, and park visitors have the potential to play a larger role in assessing them than previously.
Park restrooms bear the brunt of the challenges that come with providing public restrooms.
While they are ostensibly there for park visitor use, many others use the facilities: from delivery and bus drivers, to unhoused people, to troublemakers. Because the buildings are not staffed, and many are not routinely locked, they are vulnerable to vandalism, theft, and even use as temporary shelter. This creates a host of problems to solve that might be managed by changes in operations and robust staffing, but a city hiring freeze last year meant that vacant positions went unfilled and seasonal workers were not hired. They weren’t short just a few people. Payroll data for ground-crew staff obtained by the auditor found 10,000 fewer hours paid in July 2024 compared to the same month in 2023. That equates to 54 full-time employees not doing parks cleaning and maintenance that was happening just a year earlier.
The staffing deficit is in the process of being fixed now, with many posted positions that are expected to be filled later this year, and plans to hire a full complement of seasonal workers, but the auditor’s recommendations focus more on operations and expectations. As the title of the audit gently suggests, “City Should Reassess Approach to Park Restroom Cleanliness and Availability,” and the report goes on to make more pointed recommendations.
What’s an adequate amount of cleaning? At Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR), that answer in recent years has been pressure-washing each restroom daily, followed by a “dry” cleaning later in the day, and that’s the off-season. From April to September, crews are to “wet” clean twice a day plus one visit to “dry” clean. That’s 2-3 visits a day to each of the 129 restroom facilities in city parks, depending on the season. But setting the goal and measuring it are two different things.
Messaging from Parks has been inconsistent: “Beginning in March 2023, all open restrooms now get 2–3 cleanings per day year-round,” stated the SPR Annual Report for 2023. The City Auditor’s team was also initially told these specific goals were being met, but, “When we asked for data to analyze SPR’s plan of cleaning restrooms at least twice a day, SPR said the data they have on actual restroom cleans is not reliable.” A “cumbersome” data-entry system was blamed for the dearth of information — employees could only enter detailed time cards at the end of each day at a desktop computer and the system couldn’t record cleaning of individual restroom facilities.
Lacking proof the cleanings were happening, the auditor team made visits to dozens of restrooms to see conditions for themselves. “Overall, the restroom conditions we observed indicate that not all restrooms are getting thoroughly cleaned daily. About half the restrooms (26/50) we visited were visibly dirty, and almost 15% (7/50) lacked supplies (toilet paper and/or hand soap).”
Park visitors quoted in the audit offered similar assessments and did not mince words. Some examples, including West Seattle park users:
“Bathrooms are disgusting, left uncleaned and constantly closed.”—Roxhill Park 2024
“…Restrooms are disgusting, from floor to ceiling: years’ worth (of) spiderwebs, unproperly cleaned (if at all) sinks, toilets, walls, floors ext. Graffiti everywhere, structures themselves not maintained or inspected, there is currently bad rot on one bathroom in particular …”—Lincoln Park 2023
“My only complaint about this park is the bathrooms. They have a history of not being in good condition, (vandalized) and honestly need some major cleaning up or updating or something because they just always seem barely acceptable for people to use. As an adult (I) use it but I don’t ever want my children using it.” — Mount Baker Park 2023
During the audit period, which overlapped with the hiring freeze, the auditor discovered that staffing was stretched so thin, it wasn’t possible to clean every restroom in every district daily. But there was a compounding issue around expectations of the work that was done. In talking with managers and cleaning staff and observing cleaning work under way, the auditor found that the frequency and standard of cleaning varied by district and individuals, and that it often did not align with SPR’s documented procedures. Their conclusion: “It is important for restrooms to be cleaned to a consistent standard, so the public can be assured they are safe and sanitary to use.” But rather than finding a way to keep track of how many cleanings are completed daily, the audit recommends that SPR “set consistent and attainable restroom-cleaning expectations and communicate them to staff.” Based on that, the department now plans to create a by-restroom cleaning plan based on location and usage and then assess based on internal inspections and feedback from the public. Count on the “Find It, Fix It” app as one way for the public to provide that feedback, along with reports from members of SPR’s Park Inspection Volunteers program.
It’s not clear yet if SPR’s cleaning assessment plan will satisfy the Seattle City Council, which foreshadowed this audit in their role as the board of the Seattle Park District when they approved the budget. The district administers Proposition 1, passed by voters in 2014 to support parks, The budget is assembled 6 years at a time, called a “cycle.” During the first cycle, the levy tax rate hovered around 20 cents per $1000 of property value. During Cycle 2 (2023-2028) that jumped to 39 cents, and now is 42.4 cents for 2025, or $357 annually for the owner of an average Seattle home worth $842,000. The levy rate was approved by voters to go as high as 75 cents per $1000.
When the Council approved the Cycle 2 budget in late September of 2022, they gave SPR 6 months to report back on the “frequency of the cleaning of bathrooms and number and location of bathrooms experiencing extended closures and reasons for extended closures (such as, vandalism, equipment failure, or staffing deficiencies).” When SPR responded to that request in late March 2023, they included the footnote, “SPR does not have a mechanism to report on frequency at this time,” despite that year’s Annual Report citing 2-3x/day cleanings starting that very same month. How can you have a metric-based goal when you can’t measure the metric? The new goal sidesteps the previous metrics, and with $2.8 million dedicated to cleaning annually, SPR and the SPD board will have to agree on whether it provides enough accountability.
One of Cycle 2’s new funding priorities is retrofitting so every restroom can stay open year-round. Many of Seattle Parks’ restroom facilities were designed to be seasonal, so a weatherization program is now under way. At the close of 2024, 18 restrooms were ready for winter use, with 3 of those in West Seattle — Delridge Community Center exterior, Highland Park, and Walt Hundley Playfield. More will be weatherized in the next 4 years, but SPR is still setting the schedule for this year and beyond.
A stop at Walt Hundley last week revealed a recently cleaned and stocked women’s restroom interior, but with an unrepaired broken window and a camp set up along the building’s east side.
It was a blustery, rainy day with only a dog walker stopping by to use the trash can outside the building.
(City photo – fire damage inside a restroom)
Year-round access is where the desire for open availability to restrooms intersects with the realities of vandalism and unintended use. If restrooms are open 24 hours, they can be misused and vandalized or even set on fire. Arson has become such a problem that trash cans are no longer kept inside restrooms, which is inconvenient for users and leads to trash being left on the floors. Vandalism has escalated since the pandemic and can cause restrooms to be closed entirely until repairs can be made, and sometimes even require a complete replacement of the facility. This also pulls funds away from planned repairs and renovations.
SPR’s budget calls for 60% preventive maintenance and 40% demand (vandalism or emergent needs) work, but for the year starting in June 2023, only 14% of labor hours were for preventive work and almost 70% for demand and vandalism repairs. This was exacerbated by a lack of staff that SPR attributes in part to not being able hire and keep necessary tradespeople — plumbers in particular. Wages were raised for some of those positions for the last two years in an attempt to attract more staff and they expect that to make a difference moving forward. SPR also acknowledged in their response to the audit that the 60-40 goal is “aspirational” and that they plan to update their goals around preventive maintenance soon based on data.
Knowing all of the challenges begs the question whether 24/7/365 public restrooms are also aspirational. A lot of cities don’t even try. More than half of the public park restrooms in Portland, Oregon are closed during the winter, and the ones that are open are locked at night and cleaned just once daily. Nearly half of Tacoma’s park restrooms are closed for the winter and access is limited to park hours.
(City photo – damaged park-restroom lock)
While Cycle 2 funding is still focused on the clean/open/safe goals, Seattle Parks has run up against the reality that it just doesn’t make sense to keep some restrooms open overnight because of misuse, and has, according to the audit, been somewhat haphazardly locking them in recent years. The auditor’s report points to a lot of confusion over this, with staff not knowing who is responsible for locking up, a contracted security company in charge of some locations, and autolock systems installed on some restroom doors at Alki and other locations. Those autolocks have even locked some people “in” and have also in some cases been purposely broken by users. To resolve the confusion, SPR is now promising to identify which restrooms need to be locked, make a list of who is responsible for locking up, and then communicate it all to staff by the end of September this year.
Parks is continuing to provide updates to park users on the status of park restrooms via a dashboard on their website that is updated each Thursday. What you will not see on the dashboard is porta-potties, which are sometimes delivered when a restroom is out of order, but are not tracked by SPR. Two of the current West Seattle closures are for planned improvements at Hiawatha and South Park community centers. There are also plans for renovations at Westcrest Park. Walt Hundley Playfield and West Seattle Stadium in Cycle 2.
SPR will get their first public feedback about their audit response at a meeting of the Parks, Public Utilities, and Technology Committee tomorrow (Wednesday, February 26). Auditor and SPR staff, including Superintendent AP Diaz, are expected to speak at the 2 pm meeting tomorrow in the City Council chamber at City Hall. There is a public comment period, either in person or remotely, as the agenda explains.
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