Dear Johns

Activists seeking the return of toilets to skid row got some relief Friday--of the political kind.

After 13 of the portable latrines were yanked off the streets Thursday because of a budget cutback, a group of advocates for the homeless staged a sit-in Friday morning at Mayor Richard Riordan’s office, where they sang hymns and shook signs with the words “Outhouses for People Without Houses.”

The toilet crisis was averted less than 15 minutes later when Riordan’s press secretary, Noelia Rodriguez, told the protesters that they would have the latrines back by 5 p.m. And they did.

Rodriguez said the mayor’s office hopes to come up with the money to actually pay for the toilets in “the next couple of weeks.” She blamed the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for not requesting funds for the toilets in a budget submitted to City Hall.

Executive Director Harreld Adams said his agency would save $109,000 a year by halving the number of latrines--money, he said, that could better be used to pay for more beds at homeless shelters.

But the mayor’s budget director, Jennifer Roth, insisted that the money can be found. “It was not our intent in any way to have a toilet shortfall,” she said. “We would have worked to fix it, had we known.”

The toilet cutback was immediately noticed on the streets, said Jeff Dietrich, who works at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker Hospitality Kitchen on the corner of 6th and Gladys streets.

The latrine in front of his soup kitchen, which serves 1,000 people a day, was hauled off shortly after 6 a.m. Thursday.

“A bunch of guys came up and wanted to know where it was,” said Dietrich. “They didn’t have to tell me what they were going to do without it.”

The tale of the toilets has been fraught with controversy.

They were installed in 1994 after activists, who had lobbied for them for years, blocked the entrance to the men’s room at City Hall and staged a sit-in at Riordan’s office.

But once the toilets were placed in the 50-block area, business owners said they were a magnet for drugs and prostitution and downgraded the appearance of the neighborhood.

At the same time, they complained when transients urinated and defecated in the streets.

In August, the latrines were removed when the contractor, BFI Services Group, found used hypodermic needles in them. But the toilets were quickly returned after activists threatened to deliver a load of horse manure to Riordan’s office so he could “appreciate the magnitude of the problem,” said Alice Callaghan, director of a community center in the garment district.

“We’re relieved to have them back,” she said. “We fought for eight years to get those toilets, and we’re not going to let them go easy.”