The restrooms on Anchor Way will also include showers. | Image courtesy of the Crescent City Harbor District

South Beach is finally getting restrooms, saving the Crescent City Harbor District roughly $2,000 a month on port-a-potties, according to the harbormaster.

Harbor Commissioners last week voted 4-1 in favor of a contract with W. Marshall Jones, of Crescent City, to design and build the facility using a $450,000 California Coastal Conservancy grant. Commissioner Brian Stone dissented.

However, there may be a slight change to their proposed location. On Tuesday, Mike Bahr, founder of Community Solutions, the Harbor District’s grant consultant, proposed an alternate site a few feet away from the original site.

“The county road right of way at that spot is 66 feet wide, leaving only 12 feet to the top of the sand berm and the riprap,” Bahr wrote in his report to the Harbor District Board of Commissioners. “Twelve feet is not wide enough room for the required building setback from the edge of the road.”

The contractor would be forced to build a narrow 10-foot wide, 40-foot long building for it to fit into the original space, according to Bahr’s report. There would be no room for a walkway or adjacent ADA parking, he said.

The Crescent City Harbor District is also responsible for a $117,000 in-kind contribution to receive the grant, Bahr said.

“That bid from Mr. Jones is an all-in construction bid, so some of those services may be able to be provided by the Harbor District, which was the intention of the project,” Bahr said, adding that in-kind contribution from the Harbor could include trenching and asphalt costs as well as permitting costs. “We won’t know what that number is until we get a design and we understand the construction issues in the street right there.”

Bahr said the Crescent City Harbor District applied for three different grants to shore up the riprap on Anchor Way from Whaler Island to U.S. 101. These grant applications are still under review and address tsunami damage, storm erosion and sea level rise, Bahr said.

Though he supported putting restrooms on South Beach, Stone said he was concerned about the potential for damage on Anchor Way, not just from a tsunami, but from liquifaction in a potential earthquake.

“I worked for the Seismic Safety Commission for six years as a legislative liaison. I literally photographed the 880 viaduct that had collapsed and photographed all of San Francisco. I have over 500 photographs,” Stone said. “I would hate to build something and five, 10, 15 years down the road have the thing collapse or sink into the sand.”

Stone also asked Harbormaster Tim Petrick about the possibility of widening the area around the restrooms or allowing it to extend out onto the portion of South Beach that is within the Harbor District’s jurisdiction.

Petrick said extending the restroom area out into the beach was something the Harbor District had discussed with the Coastal Conservancy.

“That’s a separate project. It would require a completely different Coastal Commission approval with creating beach access through the riprap down onto the sand,” he said. “The reason for shifting to site 2 was there was more space, more ability to properly build that frame. I don’t know what depth the bedrock is at, but site 2 is actually on land grant property. It’s not county anymore. It’s across that line.”

Jones told Harbor Commissioners that his civil engineer of record for the project, Lee Tromble, will engineer the restrooms’ foundations to the current building code for the location. The goal, Jones said, is to keep the project close to the grant budget.

“(Tromble’s) initial ideas were basing the structure on a mass monolithic slab with some anchoring pilings to bore down through the riprap into the bedrock,” Jones told commissioners. “But for a small bathroom we’ll do what we can to keep it viable, so there’s goign to have to be some balance and practicality.”

Stone said he voted against the project based on his issues concerning its seismic issues.

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