Banned: Portland will pay nearly $200 million to remove all urinals from municipal building

Brett T. | 4:38 PM on October 01, 2019

Back in 2017, Kassy Dillon noticed something at Hampshire College that we’d never seen before; instead of having signs that said “Men’s Restroom” and “Women’s Restroom,” the college had replaced them with “Restroom with Urinals” and “Restroom without Urinals” to accommodate the transgender community.

Apparently Portland doesn’t think a change in signage is enough to accommodate all genders and is spending $195 million (we keep checking that number to see if we’re misreading it) to remodel the Portland Municipal Building to retrofit all of the restrooms, and part of the plan is to ban urinals from the building.

No, really.

The newly remodeled Portland Building has banned all urinals in an effort to "remove arbitrary barriers in our community."

The total remodeling cost taxpayers a whopping $195 million. https://t.co/76ub6MHhmV

— MRCTV.org (@mrctv) October 1, 2019

KGW8 reports:

In an email to employees last February, Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart wrote:

“We will continue to have gender-specific (male and female) multi-stall restrooms that are readily available to any employee that prefers to use one. But, there will be no urinals in any restroom in the building. This will give us the flexibility we need for any future changes in signage.”

The city has redesigned all the bathrooms to be gender neutral — which means urinals are banned even in the men’s room.

Here’s the plan:

The building’s 1st, 3rd and 15th floors will have large multi-stall bathrooms that men and women will use together.

Other floors will have separate men’s and women’s bathrooms.

But every floor will have at least one any gender bathroom.

Overall there will be 42 “all-user stalls” as the city calls them and 104 gender-specific stalls.