The historic building’s bathrooms have been closed for months, undergoing $1.2m renovations.
By McKenna Oxenden
Original Air Date: October 17, 2025
Host: Sarasota’s city hall is in a historic building. Designed by Jack West and built in 1966, at the tail end of the Sarasota School of Architecture modernist era, city hall is now producing breaking news. Literally. We’re talking about broken plumbing. McKenna Oxenden, who just joined Suncoast Searchlight, brings us this report.
McKenna Oxenden: Gotta go, gotta go right now?
If you’re inside Sarasota’s City Hall building, you better hope you can hold it.
For more than a year, the city’s first-floor bathrooms have been out of order.
Then, a few months ago, every bathroom in the building was officially closed as work crews ripped up and replaced crumbling plumbing. City officials say it’s full of “brittle, fragile” pipes.
Sarasota City Hall. Photo courtesy of the City of Sarasota via Suncoast Searchlight
The $1.2 million fix has forced city employees, commissioners and visitors to make do with outdoor restroom trailers. Alternatively, you can walk to the annex next door or trek across the street. This is turning a basic human need into a daily inconvenience—and it’s a smelly symbol of how long-overdue maintenance can hit people right where it hurts: the potties.
The plumbing, which is 58 years old, stopped working properly last July prompting the closure.
The project is expected to be finished in mid-December. It will cost taxpayers around $1.2 million and be funded through the penny tax, a 1% sales surtax, on top of the 6% state sales tax, which helps fund projects around the region.
Though the city has about 800 employees, city spokeswoman Jan Thornburg said there are only about 30 to 35 employees working in-person at city hall on “any given day.” In total, six restrooms with about 10 stalls are closed.
The city’s first-floor bathrooms have been closed since July 2024 and its second-floor bathrooms have been closed since this August. Photo by McKenna Oxenden, Suncoast Searchlight
While employees are aware of the bathroom options, City Hall lacks public signage for everyday citizens visiting the building to know where to go when the urge hits.
The restroom availability isn’t only a nuisance for convenience—but it’s been extremely difficult for disabled individuals to navigate.
Andrew Pecorella, a wheelchair user and member of the city’s Citizens with Disabilities Advisory Board, said he’s been faced with either not going to the bathroom at City Hall or to go across the street to the City of Sarasota’s One Stop Shop for a proper accessible bathroom.
City employees, commissioners and visitors can use outdoor restroom trailers, pictured here, or walk to the annex next door to use the facilities. Photo by McKenna Oxenden, Suncoast Searchlight
The bathrooms in the annex, he said, are too small for his wheelchair to fit into, and while the trailer bathroom is easier to navigate into, he struggles with properly transferring in and out of his wheelchair and can’t wash or dry his hands because things are at the wrong height.
Pecorella said the committee has not received any complaints about the bathrooms but that he has raised the issue to other leaders in City Hall, who he feels aren’t taking it seriously.
This has been McKenna Oxenden, reporting for Suncoast Searchlight. To read the full story, go to suncoastsearchlight.org/sarasota-city-hall-toilets-bathrooms-closed.
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