Schools get no break from plumbing law

Stadium toilet ratio applied to athletic fields

When construction of the $71 million Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School came in under budget last year, local officials planned to spend the savings on an educational wish list that included more library books and computers. They're being forced instead to pay $100,000 to add eight more toilets to the athletic complex.

Woburn, meanwhile, is being asked to spend $600,000 for 23 toilets at a high school athletic facility it opened last year. In Beverly, a proposed 2,200-seat high school athletic field is being designed with 50 toilets.

Across the state, school districts are grappling with a new insistence that high school stadiums - often nothing more than a field, a track, and a few dozen rows of aluminum bleachers - adhere to the same code dictating the number of toilets-per-capacity as professional behemoths like Gillette Stadium.

Rulings by the state plumbing board have rankled local officials who previously thought portable toilets and an unlocked school building nearby were enough to serve bleachers that fill only for special events, like graduation and Thanksgiving football games.

"This is a baloney decision," Paul J. Dena ro, a Woburn alderman, said at a recent City Council meeting.

In the past, many architects - as well as the plumbing engineers they consult, and municipal plumbing inspectors - had considered school athletic fields to be extensions of school buildings, not separate stadiums. That meant they did not apply the state plumbing code's stadium toilet requirement, a multipart formula that starts by calling for one toilet for every 30 female fans and one for every 60 male fans.

But then athletic facilities in Woburn and Bridgewater caught the attention of the Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters, the state's highest authority on the plumbing code. In Woburn, the school architect had designed a field with bleachers for 2,500, without toilets. In Bridgewater, plans called for 2,000 seats, with six public toilets in bathrooms attached to a storage shed and concession stand. In both cases, local plumbing inspectors said the facilities needed more. The project planners disagreed, and the issues went before the state board, which ruled that high school stadiums must be treated the same as big professional sports complexes under the code.

"The law's the law for everybody," said Paul K. Kennedy Sr., chairman of the nine-member, governor-appointed board.

Now, the decisions are echoing across the state, where 81 high schools wait in the pipeline for financial assistance from the Massachusetts School Building Authority for renovation or construction projects, although not all will have sports complexes.

"It has consequences for anybody building a high school from here on out," said James Gallivan, facilities manager for Woburn Memorial High School.

Debates have flared over whether large numbers of toilets are a wise use of taxpayer money. Kennedy said that toilets are in the public's interest and that it is unfair to ask disabled, elderly, or pregnant fans to use portable toilets or walk several hundred feet to reach bathrooms in a school that might be locked.

But some say more toilets can mean big headaches for school districts and municipal budgets.

"You have four football games a year at home in high school, and you have a toilet facility that could cost a quarter of a million or half a million dollars, in a remote location, and it's going to freeze in the winter, and inevitably every winter you're going to have pipes break, fixtures break, something's going to go wrong," said Jim Polando, vice president of the Boston chapter of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers who has worked on numerous school projects. "So here is an ongoing financial burden every single year for the town to maintain this, and to clean it."

Some also question the state board's reading of the code, which they say is not clear on what constitutes a stadium.

"You could have 10 different lawyers read that section and come up with 10 different interpretations," said state Representative Patrick M. Natale of Woburn, who recently secured a $200,000 earmark - vetoed by the governor, but restored by lawmakers - for Woburn's required athletic-field toilets.

Kennedy said the definition is obvious: "It's a structure where people are seated overlooking a field," he said. "If it barks like a dog and it acts like a dog, it's probably a dog."

He said the state board is willing to grant partial waivers to allow schools to install fewer toilets than the code requires under its formula, but the days of erecting bleachers with few or no bathrooms are probably over.

In Beverly, where officials issued a request for proposals to rebuild the high school, a stadium will be built if bids come in low enough. One option would seat 2,200 fans - and is contingent on the toilets being built as well. Should the city want to expand the capacity to 4,000, it has obtained a waiver from the plumbing board to require no additional toilets, architect Adolfo Cuevas of Mount Vernon Group said.

For Woburn, the board granted a waiver to allow 23 toilets instead of 60, as required under the code formula. The mayor and school building committee endorsed it, if not happily, hoping to avoid legal problems with the state. But the City Council has been reluctant to approve the money.

In Bridgewater, the stadium plans have been amended, and construction of additional toilets could begin soon, said Joseph Gillis Jr., vice chairman of the School Committee and the school building committee for the regional high school.

School officials there can pay for the addition without needing more money from taxpayers, unlike in Woburn. But that's little solace when it comes at the expense of other needs, Gillis said.

"It's hard to put an educational value on toilets," he said.

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com