DEPOE BAY — City planners have approved blueprints for pre-fab public toilets that will protrude into a scenic viewshed, rejecting pleas from harbor property owners to put them somewhere — anywhere — else.

“They didn’t heed any of our arguments,” said homeowner Bill Madden following a July 22 hearing of the Depoe Bay Planning Commission. “Because they were approving their own project, they ignored the zoning codes and setback requirements they impose on every other applicant. It’s about what we expected.”

Opponents threw the book at city planners, citing existing land use codes, protective overlays, exorbitant costs, traffic concerns and the failure of the city to produce a geologic survey — administrative cudgels often used by the city to freeze or modify other building plans. City officials dismissed the concerns as “not applicable,” recommending the planning commission “should not be informed by this testimony.”

Inundated by hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, Depoe Bay faces a growing restroom crisis. The overworked public facilities located in busy downtown — two lavatories just off main street — were closed earlier this year in a quarrel with the property owner, who charged the city $4,000 a year to lease the facility. Equally busy outhouses at the state Whale Watch Center are closed two days a week.

Bill Madden learned about the bathroom crunch when the city unexpectedly plopped several municipal outhouses amid his million-dollar harbor vista, then announced plans to replace them with a permanent facility that he said doesn’t look much better.

The scheme calls for a $350,000 pre-fab building to be erected on a tiny city-owned lot that overlooks Depoe Bay Harbor. Usually-sacrosanct rules that prohibit construction on designated scenic resources were passed over by the planning commission, which voted 2-1 to approve the application.

“This whole thing is bizarre,” said Madden. “The code says the only thing that could be built on a protected site like that is a ‘gazebo,’ so the city bent the rule by figuring the toilets are about the same size as a gazebo.”

Madden and his supporters, who include a number of influential business owners and residents around the harbor, are considering an appeal to the city council. One of the oddities of the decision, he observed, was that a planning commissioner who cast the deciding vote had been named to to fill a vacancy on the city council the night before.

“He was literally sent back to the planning commission to vote on this,” said Madden. “How is that fair?”