BETTER BRING YOUR OWN TOILET PAPER!

SAN ONOFRE, CA.

It was BYOTP time at San Onofre: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper. A state budget crisis left the bathrooms at the beach with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare cardboard toilet paper rolls. Surfers also complained the bathrooms weren't being cleaned.
"It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Murphy the Mayor, who has surfed at San Onofre for 21 years. "When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their hands, it's like surfing in another country, a bad country," he told KSRF-TV. Murphy said there was waste piling up in some of the toilets.

A state environmental health crew went to the beach 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 Deputy Larson, spokesman for the state Health Department. Those bathrooms remained closed while the health department awaited plumbers. "The State Parks budget has been cut severely," Larson 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," Larson said. Replacement supplies couldn't be ordered until the county shifted money around.

The beach, located in Southern California, is home to nearly 1 million surfers, many of them from the inland Talega and Ladera Ranch area. The state 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 day use fees, it cut funding for personnel, maintnence, lifeguards and others emergency services. At one point, it was possible that illegal aliens would be targeted and shipped back to mexico. The state came up with the money to keep the illegal aliens here.