EDITORIAL : L.A.'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET.

IS your ultra-low-flow toilet working to your satisfaction?

Probably not, unless you spent hundreds of dollars of your own money for a high-pressure version of what most people find is, too often, the double-flush or even no-flush toilet.

Moving to expand a water conservation program, the City Council gave preliminary approval last week to penalizing home buyers for failing to install the devices. If given final approval by the council this week and signed by the mayor, the ordinance would apply to residential properties sold on or after Jan. 1, 1999.

The program is expected to result in 78,000 residential toilets being replaced in the first year and 725,000 replaced through 2010.

If those goals are met - and if the new toilets worked as well as billed - the city would save 54.5 billion gallons of water through 2010, saving the Sanitation Bureau $640 million in capital, operations and maintenance costs. Believe it or not, the Department of Water and Power - the publicly owned utility responsible for $8 billion in mostly bad debt, much of it due to gross overstaffing - has given everyone $100 toward the purchase price of the ultra-low-flush toilets.

Since low-end ultra-lows cost about $100 and don't work so well, that means most people have the free dysfunctional version, leading to a lot of dissatisfied customers.

One of the greatest inventions of the modern world - the flush toilet in place of the outhouse - is actually performing worse than it did many generations ago, when water was free, plentiful and pure.

This may be the price that modern civilization must pay in order to preserve its precious resources, particularly in a desert like Los Angeles, which is home to hundreds of times more people than it has natural resources to sustain.

But surely if it is that important for the good of society, then everyone in the city and throughout the Southern California desert should pay the price of having to live with a problem toilet.

It is not too great a price to pay to sustain our lives in this wonderful climate, where the free spirit of millions of human beings is flourishing as nowhere else on Earth.

Saving water is a worthy goal. No sacrifice is too great.

If it's good for a few, it's good enough for all. Ultra-low-flush, water-conserving, life-sustaining toilets should be mandatory throughout the region posthaste.

If it's true that our water is that limited and that precious, then we must all join hands in the conservation effort. No exceptions. Businesses, corporations, even public facilities like government offices must comply.