Restrooms at Diamond Lakes Park are out of service ... again

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Five months after Augusta Commissioners called for changes at Diamond Lakes Parks, we’re learning the restrooms are back out of service.

We went to take a look and saw dirty sinks, toilets, and trash in the restrooms.

In September, Commissioner Alvin Mason told us more than $500,000 was set aside to fix these issues.

The city says the towers have been an issue for Diamond Lakes going back to when they opened in 2012. Back then, it was just water leakage, but since 2019 more than $900,000 have gone into fixing up these buildings that keep on having issues.

“Being a guy and you know, we going to run into the woods, but you know, on the other hand, being a female or something, they can’t do what we would do,” said Theodore “Bama” Callen, Diamond Lakes walker.

Bama has walked at Diamond Lakes almost morning for the past eight years.

While he doesn’t mind using the available portable toilets, he would like to know why they keep being closed.

“I think that they should open them if they should be open, but I don’t know the reason why they closed them again, so every time something happens, there’s gotta be a reason why they did it,” he said.

Ron Lampkin is the director at Augusta Central Services. He said, “I believe starting back in 2012, that was a separate issue that was causing the leaking, so that was corrected. It’s just been a multiple of things that have just spiraled.”

Multiple contractors have worked on this issue since 2019, but the administration says a plumbing company has yet to be held accountable for work that was paid but not done.

Moving forward with a new contractor, they hope to fully understand the full extent of this issue in the coming weeks.

“Once we get back to work on these buildings, we’ll know that the end product will give us what we need to have those towers up and running for the next 20, 30 years,” he said.

Lampkin says that while there isn’t an exact timeline, he’s confident in having these buildings looked at and fixed by spring.

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