When you gotta go, where to go? The crappy state of Colorado’s public restrooms.

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Nature calls. But what if there is no answer?

Colorado’s public outdoor bathrooms are vanishing. Where once there might have been inviting brick-and-mortar restrooms, the public is often finding padlocked doors or a head-scratching void: “I could have sworn there used to be a bathroom here.”

Lavatories are disappearing because bathrooms in parks and downtowns have morphed from a public convenience to a public nuisance. All manner of gross and sometimes dangerous items are being left in restrooms. The structures themselves have become targets for destruction. And what better hiding places are there for quick illegal acts?

Visit a public lavatory and it’s possible to stumble upon hypodermic needles, used condoms, blood (real and fake), gang graffiti, campers, sink bathers, ripped-off stall doors, dirty underwear, smashed-to-bits toilets and sinks, fentanyl, feces and urine on the floors or even the walls, broken glass, bodies. 

So, up go the padlocks. Or, in some cases, down go the entire “comfort station” buildings.

Public officials and potty promoters have been left trying to solve the conundrum of how to provide a basic, needed public service in facilities that have become magnets for vandalism and crime.

“It’s just a travesty. It’s not something that should be happening,” said Steve Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association. 

Yes, there is indeed a restroom association formed to push against the loss of loos. There is also a World Toilet Organization. It’s a global nonprofit that holds a World Toilet Summit and a World Toilet Day in a quest to push for more public places to go.

The problem is overwhelming, particularly in the proverbial land of plenty.

As restrooms disappear, portable toilets fill the void

The U.S. has just eight public toilets per 100,000 people. That’s on par with Botswana and way behind Iceland, which has 56 public toilets per 100,000, according to the Public Toilet Index, a 2021 study by a British bathroom supply company.

The study shows Colorado in the top quarter of states with regard to numbers of public restrooms. Colorado has 22 per 100,000 residents.

No comprehensive statistics have yet been tallied in Colorado for how many public bathrooms are going away due to the aforementioned problems or how many taxpayer dollars have been wasted on bathrooms that are no longer safe places to go.

But let’s use Grand Junction as an example.

There are about two dozen public restrooms in Grand Junction’s city parks. But half a dozen of those have been shut down and will remain that way because of the glut of problems, a city parks official says. Another half-dozen are closed for now, but may be reopened with some restrictions and oversight as park use goes up in the summer.

One large downtown restroom, unveiled with fanfare several decades ago, has been scraped from the corner of a parking lot just off Main Street. The empty space is now wrapped in a construction-zone fence as city officials await a high-tech, self-cleaning modular toilet that is literally coming on a slow boat from New Zealand.

In city parks, tan plastic portable toilets — the kind you might find at a music festival — are filling the void. They have been parked outside the shuttered restrooms that cost upward of half a million dollars each to build. The newest padlocked bathroom, a tidy concrete and brick building at Dos Rios Park, was only about two years old when it was locked up.

Brenda Ripley was shaking the door handle there recently to make sure it was really locked. Ripley, a physical therapist who had just moved back to Grand Junction, had two toddlers who needed to use a bathroom while playing in the adjacent park. She didn’t want to try to cram them into the portable potty so she cut play time short. 

She had gotten used to locked bathrooms while living in California for the past decade but didn’t expect to find them at a new facility in Grand Junction.

“I’m surprised,” she said as she hustled her kids toward their SUV.