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An Athens council member objects to the price tag for a proposed restroom at a city park

By: David Forster
Posted on: Wednesday, August 6, 2025

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — The city of Athens wants to install a new restroom at the West State Street ball fields, but one council member is balking at the price tag.

The proposed restroom would be built offsite and then trucked in and lifted by crane onto a concrete pad. The estimated cost is $325,000.

Councilmember Alan Swank said that amounts to $625 per square foot for the 520-square-foot structure. He said at this price it would cost over a million dollars to rebuild his 1,760-square-foot home.

“$325,000 for a prefabbed building seems like an outrageous amount to me,” Swank said at Monday night’s council meeting.

Swank said a city in central Michigan is building a restroom four times as big for $312,000.

“Why couldn’t we just build this ourselves using local contractors, employing local people and keeping the money local?” he asked.

Swank also questioned why none of the four separate gender-neutral units that would make up the restroom will have urinals.

Andy Stone, the city’s service-safety director, said the restroom will be a commercial-grade structure able to withstand heavy use and is not comparable to a home when it comes to cost.

He said the city tried three times to find a contractor to build the restroom on site. No one bid the first two times, and a bid that came in the third time was about double what the city planned on spending.

As for urinals, Stone said the priority was making sure there was enough space in each unit for a changing table and to navigate a wheelchair.

“Do you do gendered restrooms and have more stalls, or you do nongendered restrooms and have all of them be accessible restrooms,” he said.

“Ultimately, as we’ve tried to balance the demand from varying demographics and varying segments, we thought that four nongendered restrooms that were all accessible would be the most appropriate way to build this facility.”

Swank noted the restroom has been in the works for several years and said he felt there was no need to rush the funding for it now.

Mayor Steve Patterson said given the tariff wars at the federal level and their likely impact on costs, there is some urgency in getting the restroom built sooner.

“We can certainly kick the can down the road for another year,” he said. “I guarantee you the cost of having this built, whatever it is, is going to go up, and it’s going to go up significantly.”

The ordinance to allocate funds for the restroom will have its second reading at next Monday’s council meeting.