Used needles and no toilet paper: Bangor residents complain about public toilet conditions

A year after Bangor installed four new public restrooms, locals are complaining about the toilets’ unsanitary conditions and questioning whether the city is doing enough to maintain the facilities.

“Sometimes, they are somewhat clean, with only a few needle caps and no immediate sign of fires being started. Other times, it’s quite the opposite — they are alarmingly unsanitary and dangerous,” Scott Pardy, president of Fresh Start Sober Living of Maine, said during a City Council public comment period last month.

Pardy said the restrooms have essentially become “unsafe injection sites.”

“They aren’t being used for what they intended and I honestly wonder how they could not have seen this [coming],” Pardy told the BDN.

He has proposed implementing a supervised injection site in the city as a potential solution, but he said officials didn’t seem interested when he raised the idea.

When the city first proposed adding the restrooms, some residents worried the facilities would attract vandalism and drug use, but officials said they were confident that they had a plan to keep the bathrooms clean. A year later, the restrooms’ conditions suggest that this plan isn’t working, and it’s unclear if the city intends to add additional maintenance.

The city’s four 24-hour public restrooms are located in Cascade Park, Coe Park, Abbott Square on Harlow Street and at Broad Street and Washington Street. Until these permanent structures were installed last summer, all of Bangor’s public restrooms were located inside city buildings and only accessible during business hours.

The City Council initially planned to install six restrooms, with five in parks and one downtown, but revised their proposal after some community members expressed concerns about placing them in neighborhood parks. The units were purchased last year using pandemic relief funds.

Another restroom was meant to be installed at the Essex Woods dog park in 2024, but does not seem to exist. A city spokesperson did not provide comment for this story by the time of publication.

The BDN visited all four restrooms on a single day this month and found that only two were stocked with toilet paper and three of the four hand sanitizer dispensers were empty.

Although the restrooms are equipped with sharps containers, a reporter on another occasion saw needles inside the Coe Park restroom and on the ground around it. The reporter also observed what appeared to be drops of blood on the floor of the Broad Street restroom.

Bangor police have responded to two nonfatal overdoses at the public restrooms so far this year, said Sgt. Jason McAmbley, a spokesperson for the Bangor Police Department. He said he’s sure other overdoses have occurred without being reported.

“Of course we get complaints about people going in there to use drugs,” he said, but it’s difficult to prove since police can’t surveil the insides of restrooms.

He said police have also fielded complaints about people “hanging out in the bathrooms” for extended periods of time.

“People use the spaces that they can find to meet their very, very, very basic needs,” said Lezlie Lowe, a public bathrooms expert and author of “No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs.”

“If you have a significant or even a small unhoused population in a city, people may be using bathrooms as shelter,” Lowe said. This is a social and health issue that requires solutions beyond the scope of the restrooms, she said.

Community members report seeing this play out often, especially in the downtown restroom locations.

Bangor resident Jennifer Simpson said she has tried to use the Broad Street restroom while running near the waterfront, but has always found that someone was occupying the space or sitting right outside.

While she said she’d appreciate it if the city could find a way to make sure people don’t stay in the restrooms for long periods of time, she added that she’s only had issues with some of the units.

“I’ve used them probably a dozen times,” said Simpson, who has only had positive experiences with the Cascade Park restroom.

Lowe, who has studied restrooms extensively and was hired as a public restrooms consultant for the city of Portland, said it sounded like the Bangor facilities need more oversight and more frequent cleaning.

Municipalities often decide to invest in installing restrooms but don’t devote enough ongoing attention to them after they go in, she said.

Bangor previously said its restrooms would be cleaned twice a week, with the possibility of cleaning more often if needed. It’s unclear how often the restrooms are currently being cleaned.

Deciding how often restrooms need to be cleaned isn’t an exact science, Lowe said. Usage can vary depending on the time of year, but “you have to kind of commit yourself to figuring it out as a municipality … if you’re not gonna put the time and energy and money toward [maintaining them], then why did you put the bathroom in?”

Portland installed new public restrooms last summer around the same time as Bangor, and added a new unit recently that the city said would be cleaned twice a day.

Lewiston installed bathrooms in fall 2024 with plans to clean at least once a day.

Despite the concerns about how the restrooms are being used, they seem to have helped curb instances of people relieving themselves outside and filled a need for homeless people who may not otherwise have access to bathrooms at night.

Ben Treat, director of the Bangor Public Library, said the new restrooms have been a huge help and have not created any issues for library staff, who work right across the street from the Abbott Square restroom.

“Before the bathroom was installed, we definitely saw evidence that people were downtown overnight and going to the bathroom in the open, and we’ve seen a decline in that,” he said.

Treat said he sees the nearby restroom cleaned regularly and has “seen people of all walks of life step in there.”