Construction of the new public washrooms on Connaught Drive is nearly complete and the facilities could open by the end of the month.

“They’re very close now,” Ken Quackenbush, Jasper’s director of environmental services, said last week. “There’s very little left.”

Some finishing touches and a final building inspection are all that remain before the new washrooms can be opened to the public, which Quackenbush hoped would happen by late November.

The $450,000 project had initially been expected to be complete in August, but a slow start and  revisions to the initial design pushed the construction schedule back several months.

While the washrooms are expected to see their highest use during the summer, Quackenbush said the facilities will be open year-round and will likely be welcomed by users of the nearby pond hockey rink in the winter.

The washrooms are not currently connected to municipal sewer system, he added, but rather have their own holding tank that will have to be pumped out on a regular basis.

Quackenbush said the municipality decided to wait to connect the washrooms to the sewer line because that will be part of a more large-scale project in the future, which will include the installation a new lift station in the area to service the hostel that is to be built nearby, as well as other land in the area that is reserved for residential development.

“We’ve anticipated that that will happen sometime in the next 10 years,” he said.

The project was initiated after many local business owners in Jasper identified the need for more public washroom facilities, in particular during the busy tourist season, as the existing washrooms further to the northeast along Connaught Drive were insufficient to meet the demand.

“There were often lineups outside of that, in the summer at least,” Quackenbush said.