Opinion: Supes give up vanity labeled bottles, drink up -- from paper cups

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Whaddya know? Shame works.

The supervisors of Los Angeles County had been paying an intern nearly $10 an hour for tasks that included peeling the labels off bottled water and printing out and slapping on new labels with the county seal. This was reportedly to ensure that, during the board’s televised meetings, no one would think that their H2O habits amounted to an endorsement. As I wrote, this is ethically scrupulous, but suggests that the board can’t drink out of the fountain like everyone else (now that the county has taken bottled water out of other departments’ budgets), and that it perhaps believes itself to have a large and pliable TV audience that will run out and buy the water drunk by the Board of Supervisors.

Taxpayers were understandably miffed, as were, again understandably, people working at county offices and hospitals, where the bottled water supply had been cut in order to save money, and where people were told to use the drinking fountains -- which in one reported case weren’t even working.

Now the board has decided to give up the labels and the bottles. In the paper-versus-plastic quandary, it has opted in favor of paper. It will henceforth, as The Times’ follow-up reports, pour iced tap water from plain carafes into unmarked paper cups.

Can we all drink to that?