When you gotta go, you gotta go.

But if the urge hits in Suttons Bay after freezing temperatures arrive, your options are limited. Despite the village having three public restroom facilities and a smattering of portable units, none are open throughout the winter.

The business community in Suttons Bay is urging village leaders to explore options for making year-round restrooms of some sort available in the near future. The hope is to give a boost to winter tourism and business by providing a critical amenity for visitors, Village Manager Rob Larrea says.

“For us, the problem’s not the number of bathrooms, they’re just not year-round,” he tells The Ticker. “We’re trying to get more people to hang out, and we want to really encourage people to come here in the winter more, but in order to do that you need bathrooms that are year-round.”

It’s not as simple as keeping the village’s three current options open throughout the winter months, Larrea said. They weren’t built for it, and aging infrastructure in some of the units makes upgrades challenging, he says. Restrooms exist at the marina, North Park and Sutton Park.

“We have to winterize them, we can’t keep them open late,” Larrea says.

The likely long-term solution is newly constructed restrooms built to be open throughout the year, though funding could be a challenge. It's probable that the current restrooms could be rebuilt as part of other planned improvements. 

“We’re really trying to really figure it out. I think in the next three to five years we’ll have some bathrooms that are open year-round to address that desire within the business community,” Larrea says. “It will be a group effort, it won’t be one funding source, but it’s something that’s going to benefit our community.”

In the meantime, it’s possible the Suttons Bay Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which has been leading the charge on this effort, could duplicate a program run by the Traverse City DDA, which runs a merchant-supported public restroom program.

In that program, the DDA pays a stipend to merchants who volunteer to make their restrooms available to the public. Those locations are then advertised by the DDA so the public is aware. Traverse City DDA CEO Jean Derenzy said the plan, which has been in place more than 10 years, has been an excellent way to support businesses by meeting a critical customer need.

“Downtown is all about the experience,” Derenzy tells The Ticker. “Having restrooms available throughout the downtown gives extra time to enjoy the experience that businesses and the DDA strive to provide.”

Suttons Bay businesses are eager to see a solution of some sort soon.

"Every year we see more and more visitors to the area, so obviously we want to be as hospitable as possible and provide the best Suttons Bay experience we can," said Amy Peterson, who serves on the Suttons Bay DDA board and owns the Front Porch gift shop there. "This is a major expenditure, but needed, so it’s vital we all work together toward the right solution, and in the interim work find short-term options."

The relatively new Suttons Bay DDA has several other initiatives on the radar, Larrea said, including public art. Discussions at future meetings will help fine-tune priorities for the months and years ahead.