The boom times brought many things to Riverside County government — revenues, jobs and enhanced comfort of a private sort. But like most places in America, times are tough, and four-ply toilet tissue must go.
Two years ago, the county’s supervisor, Jeff Stone, responding to criticisms that the quality of the one-ply toilet paper used in the county’s 340 buildings was substandard, switched, with the board’s approval, to the softer two-ply.
This was good, and the people were happy.
But then, as sometimes happens on the taxpayers’ dime, a bit of entitlement seemed to set in, and soon enough, the county’s 10 elected officials, the executive leadership and their staff members were being treated to Angel Soft four-ply toilet tissue…
There was some whistle-blowing, and the whole toilet paper thing did not go over so well at a time when all county workers are taking a 10 percent pay cut in light of huge budget shortfalls. The county buys half a million rolls a year, its biggest volume purchase, and spent $270,000 on toilet paper in 2008…
“If we can save money, we will be switching,” Mr. Freeman said. “We’ve all taken a 10 percent pay cut. We stopped the process of people taking the government cars home, that type of thing. This is being taken very seriously.”
Or they can recycle newspapers.
Angel Soft has four-ply now? Must be the commercial-grade stuff. I can only find two-ply here in the supermarkets.
Where’s Mr. Whipple when you need him?
I bet everyone in town has a roll or two.
They need to put GPS locators in the roll to track them, same goes for pens and copy paper!
$270,000 is a lot of TP!!!
We will all be using newspaper if things don’t get better.Oh! I forgot the newspapers are going out of business.
Does anyone know how big Riverside County is? How many people? How many County employees?
Why is no one questioning why Riverside County has 340 buildings? Are they including schools?
I once had to deal with a large school district as a client for my business. During the discussion of business, I needed to know how many schools they had. No one was sure about the answer. When a school district doesn’t know how many schools are in the district, you know there’s some bureaucratic waste going on.
Personally, I prefer the two-ply over four.
I have a feeling newspapers aren’t going to flush well nor to do most people take newspapers.
The Sears catalog worked fine when we had an outhouse but times have changed.
# 6 chuck said, in part:
“Does anyone know how big Riverside County is? How many people? How many County employees?”
Riverside County, California
From the articke: 7,200 square miles, 18,500 employees. From WikiPedia: “The population of Riverside County was 1,545,387 in 2000, and the 2007 population has been estimated at 2,073,571.”
When I saw the headline, I was hoping it was about Wall Street corporations…
Switching to newspaper sounds like a good idea, if there are any left standing. Come to think of it, the regular three color underwear would now have 4th color, black, and it might require extra detergent and longer washing cycle. Maybe it’s not a good idea after all.
#7, Tell me about. Same thing happened to me.
Then, the next day, I make a sales call to a food company and ask the same question, “How many plants do you have nationwide,” and he says, “116 production and 502 distribution. This week. It changes quite a bit due to selling and buying of properties.”
If someone in the private sector can keep up with the exact number of facilities under his control when it changes weekly, I would expect our public servants to do the same thing.
That being said, a quarter of a million dollars is a lot of TP.