A mild winter, increased tourist traffic, closure of an anchor business in downtown Leland, and sustained local growth are a few of the factors Leland Township Supervisor Susan Och cites when talking about Leland’s ever-growing need for a new year-round public restroom solution.

In a “supervisor’s report” provided to Leland Township board trustees ahead of their March meeting, Och wrote that there has been “an uptick in correspondence about bathrooms in Leland Village since the Bluebird and Early Bird have closed.” The Bluebird closed its doors at the end of the 2022 season and didn’t reopen, with owners Skip and Lynn Telgard reemerging last year with a brownfield redevelopment plan for the property. The building has since been knocked down to make way for that redevelopment, which will build a smaller restaurant and a large outdoor patio area on the parcel. The Telgards intend to reopen the revamped Bluebird this fall.

The Bluebird’s temporary absence has exacerbated the township’s documented problems around restroom access. Och says visitors would often stop at the Bluebird or the Early Bird if they needed a bathroom. That option disappeared with those businesses, and Och isn’t certain it will be back: “I'm not sure that that the new Bluebird is going to function the way the old building did, as a de facto public restroom – just because the new building is going to be quite a bit smaller,” she says.

Leland does have public restrooms that the township owns and operates. But those facilities are located at the Leland Harbor (pictured) and are “not designed to operate in freezing weather,” Och wrote. As a result, Leland loses its public restrooms every November and doesn’t get them back until mid-to-late April.

Historically, Och says, the seasonality of the village’s restrooms wasn’t a big deal. Leland would see its lion’s share of tourist traffic during the summer and would shift into hibernation mode in the late fall. A few warmer winters recently – including during the peak of the pandemic, and especially with this year’s record-breaking temperatures – have changed the cycle.

I’m amazed to go out in February and see people out hunting for Leland blue stones on the beach," Och notes. "That’s something you did not see 20 years ago. I think this climate disruption is changing people's expectations of when they should visit and what's going to be here when they get here. And because of that, we're getting calls to keep the restrooms at the harbor open through the winter.”

While Och acknowledges the need for true four-season public restrooms in Leland, she says keeping the harbor bathrooms open 365 days a year is a no-go.

“They’re not built for winter temperatures. They only have an electric space heater in them, and I'm not sure that's even enough to keep the pipes from freezing in a cold snap," she says.

As designed, the harbor restrooms are also on the same system that delivers running water out to the docks. That design, Och says, requires more conservative opening and closing dates than air temperatures might indicate.

For now, businesses with open-to-the-public restrooms are bearing the brunt. Och wrote in her report that Paula Alflen, co-owner of Leelanau Books, had asked the township “to be reimbursed for the extra bathroom supplies that she is going through while hosting the only bathroom left in town.” Based on Och’s understanding, though, the township can’t legally grant that request: “The township can only spend money on things that have been authorized by a state law, and I have not found any authorization for using tax dollars to reimburse a business owner for bathroom supplies,” she wrote.

Alflen tells the Leelanau Ticker the mission of Leelanau Books “is to provide a memorable experience” for all visitors, noting that, in the winter, that mission includes “a warm fire, hot beverages, and clean restrooms.”

As Leland looks for a four-season solution to its restroom problem, Och is calling upon other shops in Leland “to arrange their businesses so that the people who are using or shopping in their stores can use the restroom if they need to.”

“It just doesn’t seem fair to point everybody to the bookstore,” she says.

As for what a long-term fix might be, Och says the most likely option is “leaving porta-johns at Van's Beach all winter” – and hoping “they don’t get smashed by snowplows or hit by Halloween vandals.” Building a more permanent facility – or retrofitting the harbor restrooms for wintertime use – isn’t off the table, but Och thinks it might be “hard to justify” to taxpayers, given the expense.

“It already seems like Leland Township taxpayers are paying for regional tourism in the form of these restrooms,” Och reasons. “Out of our $123,000 parks budget – which is for the entire township – we already spend $41,000 on maintenance of that one public restroom. I think it would be very difficult to get our taxpayers to support paying even more for a restroom that a lot of them might never use.”

Och does see one glimmer of hope, though: A new bill in the Michigan legislature that would create a 6 percent excise tax on short-term rentals, with most of the money going toward local governments. “That could answer the question of how we pay for all this stuff,” she says.