tinyurl.com/4y5a7 -> story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=817&ncid=757&e=10&u=/ap/20050317/ap_on_fe_st/budget_dirty_bathrooms
Strange News - AP BUFFALO, NY - It was BYOTP time in Buffalo: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper . A county budget crisis left the bathrooms in a municipal office buildi ng with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare ca rdboard toilet paper rolls. Employees also complained the bathrooms were n't being cleaned.
AFP/File Photo "It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Bob Fioretti, who has w orked in Erie County's Rath Building for 21 years. "When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their h ands, 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 an d said many of the bathrooms were clean and on the way to being restocke d Some toilets, however, looked like they had been deliberately plugged , said Kevin Montgomery, spokesman for the county Health Department. Tho se bathrooms remained closed while the health department awaited plumber s "The Building and Grounds Department has been cut severely," Montgomery t old The Associated Press on Thursday. "Towels and soap were running out, and that was also due to this fiscal c risis," 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 millio n people and encompasses the city of Buffalo, the weathered city that ha s struggled to rebuild its economy since the steel and grain mills close d down. Since the 1950s, the city has lost half its population and now n umbers fewer than 300,000 people. Rather than raise the sales tax, it cut funding for personnel, health cli nics, auto bureaus, snowplowing, parks, the arts, school nurses and othe rs services. At one point, it was possible that zoo animals would become refugees, temporarily shipped off to other zoos for lack of funding. Th e county came up with the money to keep the animals home.
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