Where can you go?
An ongoing discussion between the town of Taos and local business owners over the availability of public restrooms is raising tensions – again. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the town has shut down, opened, then shut down it’s public restrooms, located behind Taos Plaza and the John Dunn Shops, due to COVID-19 concerns.
Nowhere to go
As many local businesses attract both tourists and locals, patrons are left with nowhere to go to the bathroom. Local shop owners have said the lack of public restrooms has forced people to resort to less-thanappropriate means: urinating and defecating behind public dumpsters and benches in the historic downtown and elsewhere.
Establishments like the Gorge
Bar & Grill and Hotel La Fonda de Taos used to be available options, but both of those establishments currently remain closed. Kit Carson Park’s bathrooms and the public bathroom at the Kit Carson Home and Museum remain closed as well.
While the town says it has no indication that the public has been relieving themselves in undesirable places, employees at some of the John Dunn Shops say otherwise.
“I have seen new mothers having to change their screaming baby’s diaper on a bench in 20-degree weather,” said one John Dunn shop owner who wished to remain anonymous due to their perceived potential backlash from the town. “Adult people pooping in their pants while trying to make it to their car, kids crying in shame as they drench their only pants with urine, having reached their limit. It’s horrifying.”
At Chocolate + Cashmere (130 Bent Street), employee Pascale McCracken and friend George Mendoza say they can attest to the public bowel relief.
“People have just come to the bench and let it go,” said Mendoza, gesturing as to how one would sit to attempt such a feat. “You’ll see particles all over the adobe bench and it takes a while for the rain to knock it off and nobody’s really washing it off. Nobody wants to get near it.”
McCracken said that one of her co-workers “sees a lot of matter out of place.” She added that the lack of a public restroom in the area (as well as the lack of a restroom in Chocolate + Cashmere) forces her to go to home twice a shift to use the bathroom. “Luckily my boss is cool and I’m able to run home real quick,” she said.
“You can’t have people using the whole area as an outdoor toilet,” said another John Dunn Shops employee who also wished to remain anonymous due to worry about potential backlash from the town.
A pandemic problem
The town’s argument is simple: it’s a pandemic.
“Encouraging causal shopping trips for jewelry, candles, art and other non-necessities for the day by out-of-state tourists from highly impacted areas with little or no restrictions is not either legally permissible nor a priority for the town of Taos, Taos County, nor the State of New Mexico at this time,” said town manager Rick Bellis in an email.
The town has suggested to businesses that they offer their own private bathrooms to customers, but business owners were quick to point out that this was neither compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) nor various insurance policies.
“We are not allowed to offer noncompliant restrooms to the public,” said Polly Raye, landlord of the John Dunn Shops. “That’s always been one of the problems in the historic district, where buildings were built years ago with small restrooms. Retrofitting the restrooms to be compliant takes a large amount of space which the historic buildings generally don’t have. Plus it’s more expensive than most merchants can manage.”
Ranee Malanga, owner of Artwares Contemporary Jewelry in
Taos Plaza had another reason keeping her from offering her bathroom to the public. Because she owns a high-end jewelry store, her insurance policy won’t allow customers to have bathroom access.
Another business owner said ADA compliance was “why the bathrooms in the parking lot were designed and built in the first place.” They added that because of the lack of facilities available, they “receive the brute force of the public outcry. People scream at me while I’m just at work doing everything I can just to keep from going out of business because they desperately need a bathroom.”
People are here
The town maintains that we are under a public health order, and Bellis was clear in saying that the public should only be leaving their houses for “essential medical, food, work or other trips permitted under the state guidelines.”
Despite this, the current “red to green” framework allows nonessential businesses to open at 25 percent capacity, and most of the stores in the Taos Plaza and the John Dunn Shops are open and serving customers to some extent. This includes businesses like chocolate shops and restaurants, boutiques and jewelry stores.
Whether the town and public like or not, people are going out. “We’re allowed to be open,” said one of the John Dunn Shop employees and asked rhetorically “People come in, what am I supposed to say, [the town] doesn’t want you here, go away?”
“You can’t tell a pregnant woman, ‘I’m sorry, too bad. Hold it until you can get to a gas station,’” another employee added.
McCracken said at Chocolate + Cashmere they often send people back to their hotels.
“We send the clients either back to their hotel room, their rental [or] their Airbnb, because it’s so sporadic in regard to Bent Street being open,” McCracken said, adding “it’s heartbreaking to tell the tourists there’s no restrooms. They’re going to end up at a gas station, and they’re not very nice around here, cleanliness-wise.”
Raye pointed out that it’s not just tourists in need of a place to go, and that in fact many of the visitors are from around the Enchanted Circle.
“We see very few out of state visitors these days,” Raye said, but added she does see “shoppers from [Arroyo] Hondo, Ranchos [de Taos], Red River and Angel Fire. They’re sort of locals, but too far from home to use their own restrooms.”
Raye said bathrooms should be essential. “Nobody questions that food is an essential service. But ... you’ve got to deal with the other end of the GI tract too, and that is an essential service.”
Who maintains it?
Questions have arisen about who would be responsible for maintaining the restrooms, were they to open. The town says they don’t have enough money or manpower to clean and keep the restrooms COVID safe, while local merchants say they don’t feel they should have to pay for the restroom cleaning either.
Bellis said that the town had to cut $2,000,000 – or 20 percent – from its budget, “laying off staff and closing all but essential services, which was also a state directive to local governments.”
The town did try to address the issue with the installation of portable toilets last year– but that didn’t last long. Bellis said that not only were there not enough people using them to justify the cost, but that “they were graffitied, feces and urine were spread all over them – and were totally demolished in the first three days. Both to satisfy business complaints about their condition and the people they were attracting … the experiment was discontinued.”
Since then, Bellis also said they had suggested the Taos Chamber of Commerce, Downtown MainStreet, the John Dunn Shops, “or any of the businesses operate the bathrooms, since they exist solely for the benefit of the Plaza-area businesses, not the town government or greater community,” but that they didn’t want to be responsible for cleaning and maintenance.
In the past, the town and local merchants have entered into a public-private partnership. Polly Raye explained that the decadesold agreement between six businesses and the town stated that the town would pay the water bill and
the merchants would maintain the restrooms in their various facilities. Participants included Hotel La Fonda de Taos and the John Dunn Shops restroom, among others. This agreement ended in June of 2020 when the town cancelled the contract.
Since 2009, merchants and guests have relied heavily on the public facility, and many of them say that being asked to maintain it – especially in these trying times – is too much. Many also pointed out that the town collects the gross receipts tax (GRT) from the local shops, and that they therefore felt it was the town’s responsibility to maintain the restrooms.
Raye noted that many of the businesses are already struggling financially with the slow traffic during winter months. “It’s very hard on them,” she said of the stores. “They’re struggling to survive. Merchants don’t have any revenue source for paying for that kind of thing. That’s what the taxes are for, public services.”
One anonymous business owner put it succinctly: “None of us had a plan in place for what to do in case of a pandemic. However, at this point … all of us have learned the hard way about some of the things we just can’t do. We just can’t invite people to come to town to shop and support local businesses if we are going to collectively slam our bathroom doors in their faces. We need a solution, not blame.”
Other towns are doing it
While the town of Taos deals with the issue of how to (and who will) open up public restrooms, other area villages have figured it out.
According to the Village of Taos Ski Valley’s administrator, John Avila, they have been investing funds into a public composting toilet, and meanwhile have paid to maintain and clean portable toilets, but he did add “during the summer visitor explosion, our Chamber of Commerce, from the director on down, contributed to the COVID sanitization effort.”
Red River paid for and maintained portable toilets in the village as well, but mayor Linda Calhoun said that they have now closed due to cold weather. Currently, Red River has public restrooms available at the Red River Conference Center during regular business hours.
“With most of our restaurants doing take-out only and our other businesses having their restrooms closed, the town is forced to provide some facilities for our guests,” said Calhoun. “It is a challenge, but when tourists are coming in just for the day, we have no other option but to try and take care of their needs.”
Angel Fire village manager Jay Mitchell said that while they don’t have public facilities open at the moment, they plan to open their gym and community center in the coming weeks, and with that, the bathrooms. “The men’s urinals will be separated with a urinal inbetween vacant. They will be sanitized and the complete facility will be fogged on a daily basis,” Mitchell explained. “We’re using a professional cleaning service. I don’t need my employees sick either.”
At the end of the day, all of the businesses in the Taos Plaza and John Dunn Shops say they want a positive outcome; that they don’t want to fight with the town on this issue, and that it might be easily resolved with some constructive cooperation.
“If the town is looking for a way to join this community-wide effort [to help struggling businesses], there is one small thing they can do that will help all the merchants make it through this difficult time, and that is keeping the public restrooms open,” said Raye.