A Lockout in Paradise? : Views Mixed on Indigents’ Bathroom Ban

The ubiquitous brown shopping bag at his side, the 27-year-old drifter from Pennsylvania sat alone on a bench outside the Hall of Administration, praising Santa Ana.

“It’s like paradise here,” he said. “Nobody bothers you.”

That may be starting to change, however, as county officials, reacting to complaints by employees about bag ladies and homeless men in the public bathrooms, moved to forbid the public from using the two main bathrooms on the ground floor of the Hall of Administration building in Santa Ana’s Civic Center.

“I don’t agree with the decision because I’m on the bottom,” he said, adding that he would rather spend his money on something other than rent. “But people on the top, they see things differently. . . . If they’ve experienced what I have, maybe they would see it my way. I think everybody has the right to survive and be clean.”

‘People Have to Have a Place’

On the sprawling lawn nearby, a woman named Dolores passed the spring-like day surrounded by a makeshift fortress of her suitcases and straw bag.

“People have to have a place to go,” she said in a whisper, trying not to be distracted from her doodles on a tablet. “Everybody will go to the bus station across the street or they’re going to have it in the bushes.”

Inside the administration building Friday, opinions were mixed about the decision to allow only county workers to use the main women’s and men’s rooms.

“A lot of the people who work here are just scared,” said Julie Stewart, 30, who works in the personnel office across from the bathroom. “You don’t know where these people have been, what they’ve got, and you’re sharing the same facility with them. They start yelling and the smell is just. . . .”

Doreen Curtis said she slipped and hit her head on the tiled floor recently because a bag lady called “Fay” had splashed water as she tried to bathe herself in one of the two small sinks.

‘We Don’t Need to Share It’

“They should have a place to go but we don’t need them to share it with us . . . ,” said Curtis’ co-worker, Barbara Smaldino. “I don’t know what the solution is.”

Vergil Best of the county’s General Services Agency said this week that the approximately 100 office workers on the ground floor agreed to a 90-day trial of the new program, which is expected to start in several weeks.

The two bathrooms will be locked and keys will be given only to employees. Two smaller bathrooms on the ground floor will be open to the public.

“This is the Civic Center,” said Greg Obando, 23, a county accountant from Cerritos. “I don’t think they should be here. They could go to gas stations.”

But not everyone agreed.

Marion Jasieniecki, who works for the Board of Supervisors, said: “I don’t think it’s that big of a problem. It kind of scares you sometimes. But we shouldn’t be scared by other human beings, should we?”

Then, as an afterthought, Jasieniecki added: “I’m a bad person to ask because I’ve got eight kids and I’m a softy. You never know in today’s society with the economy . . . any of us are just one step away from being a bag lady.”