The Bainbridge parks department is tired of cleaning up after someone else’s dirty work.

Vandals have repeatedly targeted the restrooms at Battle Point Park, and officials with the Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District have said, “Enough.”

Over the last few years, the park’s bathrooms have been vandalized almost 10 times — with dispensers ripped out of the walls and dry wall torn up — and the damage has cost the parks district nearly $500 each time it’s happened.

“Every time we put the paper towel holder and sanitizer [dispensers] on the wall, they get ripped off within a couple weeks,” said Dan Hamlin, Bainbridge Island park services superintendent. “It was getting expensive and time-consuming.”

As a temporary solution, a consensus has been reached by park staff to not replace the soap and towel dispensers in the park until the summer season. When school gets out, the park will be crawling with visitors come June through September.

“It’s not a popular decision. We know that,” Hamlin said. “A lot of people are wishing we would put it back in.”

Hamlin’s gotten calls about the public restrooms not having proper hand-washing items, especially from mothers who take their children into the popular park’s restrooms.

But the cost of repair and time it takes to fix the bathrooms is taking its toll on parks department resources, Hamlin said. When vandals yank the dispensers down, with it comes dry wall, other materials — and time that could be spent on other park projects.

“You lose all the labor. It’s not just the labor of fixing the bathroom,” he said. “You’ve just lost time for your scheduled work.”

Hamlin admitted that vandalism on the island is a rarity and not a chronic problem. Part of the issue could be that the bathrooms are left unlocked at night, leaving the facilities open to mischievous teens or others.

Incidents at Battle Point Park have popped up in Bainbridge police reports before.

In mid-February, for example, a police report was filed for an act of malicious mischief there along with reckless driving (including racing). An 18-year-old attempted donuts in the parking lot, but sent his car into a ditch inside the park.

While the police are aware of the vandalism, other high priority calls take precedence. Additionally, the parks staff are not sure who is responsible for ripping out the dispensers.

Officials are resigned to the fact that some vandalism is hard to stop. And parks executive director Terry Lande said the park vandalism isn’t unique to the island.

“It happens across the country. It’s a place where people who want to do damage, they have access,” he said of public parks. “There’s not much you can do about it.”

While the Battle Point bathrooms are old and may make the August capital projects priority list to get fixed up, Hamlin isn’t too hopeful since many other projects need to be taken care of first. If the bathrooms are chosen as a priority project, it would be funded sometime next January.

In the meantime, he and other park staff are asking for the public to keep their eyes peeled for suspicious characters. Park visitors are asked to call 911 to get an officer on site.

Authorities will file the appropriate report and contact the parks department, Hamlin said.

“That’s the main thing: Just report what you see if you see something suspicious,” he said. “We’re trying to provide a good service and we have to deal with these vandals in this way.

“We are going to reinstall them [the dispensers] and maybe with the public’s help we can keep them on longer this time,” he said.