Employees Bring Own Toilet Paper to Work

Employees Bring Own Toilet Paper to Work

Thu Mar 17, 4:18 PM ET

BUFFALO, N.Y. - It was BYOTP time in Buffalo: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper. A county budget crisis left the bathrooms in a municipal office building with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare cardboard toilet paper rolls. Employees also complained the bathrooms weren't being cleaned.

"It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Bob Fioretti, who has worked in Erie County's Rath Building for 21 years.

"When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their hands, it's like working in another country, a bad country," he told WGRZ-TV. Fioretti said there was waste piling up in some of the toilets.

A county environmental health crew went through the building Wednesday and said many of the bathrooms were clean and on the way to being restocked. Some toilets, however, looked like they had been deliberately plugged, said Kevin Montgomery, spokesman for the county Health Department. Those bathrooms remained closed while the health department awaited plumbers.

"The Building and Grounds Department has been cut severely," Montgomery told The Associated Press on Thursday. Besides losing money, the department has had layoffs.

"Towels and soap were running out, and that was also due to this fiscal crisis," Montgomery said. Replacement supplies couldn't be ordered until the county shifted money around.

The county, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, is home to nearly 1 million people and encompasses the city of Buffalo, the weathered city that has struggled to rebuild its economy since the steel and grain mills closed down. Since the 1950s, the city has lost half its population and now numbers fewer than 300,000 people.

The county has had to slash 2,000 jobs and cut services to close a $100 million-plus shortfall in its $1.1 billion budget.

Rather than raise the sales tax, it cut funding for personnel, health clinics, auto bureaus, snowplowing, parks, the arts, school nurses and others services. At one point, it was possible that zoo animals would become refugees, temporarily shipped off to other zoos for lack of funding. The county came up with the money to keep the animals home.
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Bill's Comment: Imagine if this was in the State of Florida? I can hear the liberals really clamor for the toilet paper tax. I wonder if the City of Buffalo contemplated such a ridiculous idea as well? They were probably too constipated, which may be a good thing, in this case.

Does that mean if you forgot to bring your roll of toilet paper, and everyone else's is used up, you are shit out of luck?

Parents of school children- watch out! You may be next.

A factoid from Bill: In the early 1990's, New Jersey had a "toilet paper" tax. This led to then-Governor Jim Florio's demise.