Park Service Outhouse Shows
Public’s Tax Dollars At Work

DELAWARE WATER GAP, Pa. — Mother Nature is a nice place to visit, but many of its aficionados don’t really want to go there, if you get our drift. So the National Park Service provides certain ... amenities. Boy, does it!

To serve the needs of hikers in a northeastern Pennsylvania park here, NPS recently unveiled an outhouse that in its excesses would stand a fair chance of embarrassing the Sultan of Brunei. Depending upon who’s punching the calculator, the rustic two-holer — no plumbing or electricity — cost taxpayers somewhere between $333,000 and $445,000.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which sniffed out the story, reported late last week that the pretentious privy is embellished with "a gabled slate roof, cottage-style porches, and a handsomely tapered cobblestone masonry foundation in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright."

It also boasts imported limestone porch railings, custom-mixed paint that cost $78 a gallon, and landscaping that includes wildflower seed for which Uncle Sugar paid $720 a pound.

The wildflowers were needed to camouflage the foundation, a structural behemoth with 29-inch-thick walls ... just in case it happened to be located at the epicenter of an earthquake. There’s nothing worse than a jolted john.

Perhaps the cheapest part of the whole shebang is the toilet itself, a "state of the art" composting wonder that only cost $13,000. That, of course, would buy a baker’s dozen of the military aircraft toilets that liberals screamed so loudly about a few years ago; it must be assumed that the comfort of hikers and the egos of Park Service bureaucrats rank ahead of such frivolous concerns as national defense.

The congressman in whose district the overpriced outhouse resides is Rep. Joseph M. McDade, second-ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. McDade pushed for the appropriation that included funding for the installation, but was aghast when he found out what his backing had wrought.

"That's terrible," the Inquirer quoted McDade as saying when told of the project. "It's a Taj Mahal! Why the hell did they do that?"

NPS officials weren’t embarrassed at all.

"Frankly, that's what we're paying for toilets," shrugged Dennis Galvin, deputy director of the National Park Service.

"We could have built it cheaper," the article quoted park superintendent Roger Rector as admitting, "but we wanted someone coming up the trail or off the road to encounter a nice restroom facility."

One way of "building it cheaper" would have been standardized plans — the waterless Water Gap wonder cost $102,614 for designs alone, and another $81,220 for on-site supervision by an NPS engineer who moved to the park from Denver for the duration of the 10-month project.

But standardized plans are beneath the Park Service’s dignity.

Standardization, sniffed Tom Solon, the recreation area's chief architect, "has some merit for the military or McDonald's, but each national park has unique needs."

That attitude rankles Jack Wilburn, former chief of maintenance at the Gulf Islands National Seashore on the Florida and Mississippi coast. "They're a bunch of prima donnas who just want to win awards for design excellence," Wilburn says of NPS engineers. "Cost doesn't bother them; they always want to do something monumental and unique."

By way of cost comparison, the Inquirer article notes, Wilburn designed and built permanent comfort stations on environmentally sensitive islands for about $20,000, and portable toilets in "widespread use" elsewhere in the Watergap park cost $500 a unit.

The budget variety outhouses will also presumably get more use: the grandiose new structure will be locked all winter because composting toilets don’t work in cold weather.

Of course, that would save on supplies, assuming there are any supplies — there apparently weren’t the first day.

"It's beautiful," the Inquirer quoted one inconvenienced female hiker as remarking, "but I'm glad I always travel with Handi Wipes."