Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the city will move forward with a prefabricated bathroom at Veterans Memorial Park before it loses state funding for the project.
The Veterans Memorial Park Foundation of Pensacola, which maintains the monuments and landscaping at the park, has been seeking a restroom facility at the park for over a decade.
Their efforts have been met with delays and even a lawsuit by nearby property owners when the city allowed the foundation to install a bathroom trailer at the site.
Last year, the city went out to bid for a 1,750-square-foot bathroom and an educational space, but no bid came in under the $600,000 budget.
Members of the Park Foundation expressed frustration that another Memorial Day was being observed at the park with no restroom facilities. Instead, portable toilets had to be rented.
“It’s a shame. It doesn’t say much for what the city values,” past Foundation President and Capt. USN Ret. Butch Hansen told the News Journal before the Memorial Day event. “It tears your heart out when you see some of the veterans that would like to spend some time down there, but they can’t.”
Hansen said the foundation is willing to help fund a bathroom facility—one that ideally includes room for an education facility and storage—with money from the sale of its bathroom trailer.
“Right now, we’re willing to take whatever the city gives us,” Hansen said.
Reeves said the city had offered to install a prefabricated bathroom like the one being installed at the Roger Scott Pool or a Portland Loo, but those ideas were previously rejected by the foundation.
Normally, Reeves said the city takes input on a project and gets feedback, then moves forward to execute the project with the funding it has while trying to “check as many boxes as possible” from the feedback, and he implied that the city should have moved forward earlier instead of deferring to the VMP board.
“Given the fact that these are the stewards of this park, that this VMP board has done that,” Reeves said. “We’ve gone well above and beyond that. We have been shoulder to shoulder now for three years through multiple rejections of ideas, trying to collaborate.”
Reeves said the city will correct that and now move forward with installing restrooms at the park.
“I’m not putting that blame on the VMP board,” Reeves said. “Our goal was to try to find harmony through multiple different iterations of this over the years, and certainly what was in the media report that said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to raise money, we’ll take anything.’ We agree. If that was the attitude, we could have gotten this done much, much faster. So that’s all water under the bridge. We’re going to get this done faster. We’re going to put a prefab bathroom in, and we’re ready to execute on that.”
Reeves didn’t say what the timeline was, but the Roger Scott bathroom had a turnaround time of 10 months from when the city ordered it to when it is expected to be complete.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola to install prefabricated bathroom at Veterans Memorial Park
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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