Group Seeks Return of Portable Toilets to Skid Row

People come and go on Los Angeles’ skid row without much notice, but when 26 portable toilets disappeared from the sidewalks, it quickly became a very big deal.

Since the toilets were hauled away Tuesday evening by the company that owns them, the homeless have been forced to use streets and alleys as bathrooms, skid row’s leading toilet activist has leaped into action, and the mayor’s office has gotten involved.

The city and BFI Services Group officials are hoping that the portables will be back in place today. But BFI executives say the toilets were carted away for good reason: Workers were finding as many as 30 used hypodermic needles a day in and around them.

“If I leave the toilets there and we don’t pump them, that will breed disease,” said Pat Price, vice president of the waste company, which recently won the city contract to service the skid row privies. “If I pump, I have to find someplace to put the needles and I don’t have any place to put the needles.”

Because another branch of the giant waste management company handles medical waste, Price expected to have a solution soon.

But activist Alice Callaghan was not assuaged.

“If they had a problem, you sit down and talk to people about it,” she said Wednesday. “You just don’t go out and pick the toilets up and have no regard for the consequences. . . . Everybody at BFI went home last night to homes with a toilet.”

Callaghan, who works at the Las Familias del Pueblo social services agency on the edge of skid row, fought City Hall for years to get the portables approved. To make her point in 1994, she and a small group of demonstrators blocked a City Hall men’s room for several hours.

The portable potties were installed the same year, and Callaghan has kept an eye on them since.

“You can imagine my surprise when someone just hauled them off. . . . We watchdog this issue carefully.”