Can the city of San Diego’s shamefully deceptive and manipulative handling of its push to impose trash-collection fees on 233,000 single-family homes get any worse? Mayor Todd Gloria and most of the City Council seem determined to find out. Let’s review the history.
Chapter One: In 2022, city leaders placed Measure B on the ballot to amend the City Charter to allow the city to charge single-family homes a separate fee for trash collection on top of what they already paid through their property taxes. It was pitched as a matter of equity since residents in multiunit properties already paid such fees to private trash haulers. The ballot language pretended its real goal was to allow City Hall “to explore ways to improve your service.”
Instead, the goal was to take a decisive first step toward imposing new fees on hundreds of thousands of families, many in lower-income, mostly minority areas like Lincoln Park, Paradise Hills, Valencia Park, Encanto, Oak Park and Emerald Hills — undercutting the equity argument. Even as they looked forward to how much revenue it would generate, City Council Sean Elo-Rivera and Joe LaCava flatly declared, “Measure B is not a rate increase.”
Aided immeasurably by a city forecast that the monthly fee — were it imposed — would be a reasonable-sounding $23 to $29, Measure B narrowly ed.
Chapter Two: In November, that $23 to $29 estimate proved to be a dishonest bait-and-switch when city officials preparing to implement Measure B said the standard rate for newly billed homeowners would be $53 a month, with a 22 percent increase to $65 a month in 2027. Gloria asserted the vastly higher fee was made necessary by surveys showing the level of services the city intended to provide would give the public what it wanted, based on “hundreds of community meetings.”
But did this alleged input reflect an awareness by residents that their alleged service preferences would lead to far more costly bills? Of course not. The city’s move to reduce the base fee from $53 to $47.59 a month failed to stem a flood of public criticism.
Chapter Three: Under state law, after the city finalized details on the proposed fee, it had to mail information about the fee to every property owner. If a majority of all parcel owners and tenants affected by the fee sent in formal notices provided by the city rejecting the fee, it would be blocked.
But in recent weeks, this process has only triggered a fresh wave of outrage. Residents said the multi-page document they got from the city was confusing and that the form they needed to file to object was cumbersome, not the simple “protest card” they were told to expect.
Is this new botch due to incompetence — or to an effort to ensure $80 million in new funding reaches city coffers to help pay enormous pension bills?
The reasons to cynically assume the latter are many. As local resident Bill O’Connor noted, it is “ironic/hypocritical that our all-Democratic City Council has given us such a tedious, obscure balloting method to exercise our option to reject the new trash fees. This is the same Democratic Party that universally advocates strongly for ease and clarity of voting rights.”
Gloria, Elo-Rivera, LaCava and their allies have no possible way to credibly rebut this point. If making voting easy is a moral imperative, what the city has done/is doing is indefensible.
Chapter Three of the trash fee power play, like Chapters One and Two, should hang over the political futures of all involved. It is one more giant failure from a City Hall that for 30 years has regularly inflicted such debacles on San Diegans.
Two words were added to clarify one part of the objection process.
