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Fear is a powerful thing. It can cloud judgment and dull compassion. It can feed our worst impulses and impede our best ideas, making even the obvious decisions seem hard. When communities allow themselves to be guided by fear, much-needed action can be delayed or even abandoned, and a piece of the social fabric that binds people together can be lost.
Some Bangor residents are worried about a city proposal to add public bathrooms in parks, fearing that it could attract unwanted behavior. This fear highlights a misunderstanding about who uses public restrooms and, intentionally or not, continues the unfair maligning of unhoused people as some monolith to be scared of.
Bangor officials, and the entire Bangor community, must stop letting fear dictate decisions about how and where to provide services in the city. City officials have already taken the prudent, if delayed, step to advance a plan for public bathrooms, and the ongoing conversation about where to locate them provides an opportunity to reject the lingering fear.
It’s not just about being compassionate; it’s also about being smart.
We’ve seen it time and again: Members of the public and public officials worry that providing needed community services is going to attract more people seeking those services. These perspectives are often accompanied by an inaccurate and unhelpful caricature of the people — often those who are homeless — seeking those services.
This not only dehumanizes people, reducing their varied experiences to the most visible actions of a few. It also ensures that we don’t take the steps to help address the very behaviors and impacts that concerned citizens worry about.
Do some unhoused people, like other members of the community, vandalize and cause problems on public property? Of course. But if we shy away from addressing the issues that are already on our doorstep, if we fail to recognize the needs of our fellow citizens, that is merely a recipe for things to get worse.
It has long been clear that Bangor needs public restroom facilities downtown that are open 24/7, relatively easy to clean and harder to vandalize. The city’s proposal to use federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to install metal restroom facilities downtown and in several city parks would achieve that.
And, despite the fears, it has also been clear that public bathrooms can benefit the entire community, not just people who are unhoused. It can ease a burden for local businesses, prevent people shopping and visiting downtown from relying on those businesses for restroom facilities, and help families who want to enjoy a park but don’t live nearby. The list goes on and on.
“Part of this effort is based on the understanding that having available public bathrooms is more than just a convenience for people, it’s also a matter of public health,” the city said in a statement last week. “People can’t spend an extended amount of time using a downtown or city amenity without available public bathrooms.”
The city has put forth a good proposal. As the ongoing community public forums about the proposal wrap up, officials should consider productive location suggestions, like that from Bangor Public Library Director Ben Treat regarding Peirce Park next to the library. But the city must not let a misguided fear of homeless people, or a misunderstanding about who can benefit from public restrooms, devolve into analysis paralysis about the location of these needed facilities.
Determine which locations make the most sense, finalize those locations and install the facilities. Public restrooms are a good step forward for Bangor, and it’s time to act.
