Times are tough when four-ply toilet tissue must go.

LOS ANGELES — 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.

“When he made that change from one-ply to two-ply, it was very well received,” said Verne Lauritzen, Mr. Stone’s chief of staff.

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. A sense of inequity set in: Among the 18,500 employees working over the 7,200 square miles of this county just east of Los Angeles, why was it that some — less than a 100 in all — were getting the extra soft?
Read on.