San Diego is broke and its leaders have convinced voters that people who live in less dense housing should pay more into city coffers.
Elected leaders’ efforts targeting people who live in single-family homes and fewer than four-unit condo or apartment buildings will come to a head on Monday when the City Council may approve fees of nearly $600 a year for some residents — fees that will rise rapidly to nearly $800 over the next three years.
To sell those fees, the city hired Bay Area consultants known for setting the highest trash collection rates in California (including Long Beach, Oakland and San Jose) and spent no less than $4.5 million to hold the least scientific survey ever — aimed at raising the cost of service from the $73 million in the city’s request for proposal to the $155 million the consultants arrived at. And despite requests, city officials so far won’t release the consultants’ underlying data.
The “public participation” exercise never offered the choice to keep the existing service at its affordable cost — not even mentioned in the final study. Instead, the final proposed fees are twice what the Measure B ballot language promised and many services won’t be available for two years or more.
The nasty campaign targeting single-family homeowners was largely ignorant of facts — including that the census concluded that about a third of single-family home residents are actually renters, that more than a third are below median income, up to 24% are seniors still paying mortgages, and so on. About 47,000 households that relied on the city service are now being pushed to use private haulers — though no deadline was set. And the favored billing mechanism is based on liens that can end in foreclosure.
As this unfolded, it became apparent that the city has no idea who is using its trash system. The city spends nearly $20 million a year on private haulers for its own facilities — while allowing wasteful, overlapping routes for commercial haulers. In a limited scope audit, the city found that private haulers — and their customers — are not paying their fair share at the landfill and for road damage.
The punch line: everyone’s trash costs are going to increase.
And the cost of service study includes new, previously unplanned hires and purchases, failed and deferred past maintenance and a clutch of programs like I Love A Clean San Diego that do not serve households.
So I’d like to propose a truly fair and sound path forward.
First, set fees for the first year at the monthly rate promised in the ballot language, $23 to $29. We know the city needs money but the burden of digging the government out of the hole it climbed into should not be shouldered by less than half the city’s households. While Sean Elo-Rivera and Joe LaCava looked at their homes in Kensington and La Jolla, they forgot about Southcrest, almost all of Districts 4 and 8, and neighborhoods like North Clairemont where most homeowners earn less than median income.
Second, create a citizen oversight committee with meaningful input to review annual increases and keep them affordable.
As to billing, the city recently celebrated the Public Utilities Department’s course correction, including adding effective software. That’s where the trash bill belongs. Tax roll billing is a direct line to foreclosure. Cities already have the legal authority to get property liens for unpaid utility bills. We need to have the checks and balances of a fair process, and the benefit of prompt, current responses to billing concerns and mistakes that cannot occur with annual tax roll billing.
Trash fees should reflect our larger goals of creating less waste and recycling more. In the haste to get bills onto the tax rolls, our officials bought a scheme that encourages creating waste. That’s dumb.
Every trash-maker should be funding disposal equally — preferably based on use. Every trash-maker should be funding the landfill and paying for damage to the roads. People in multi-unit buildings make about the same amount of trash as people in single-family homes. It’s nonsensical to charge trash-makers more because of the structure we live in.
The rates should reflect that many services and promises won’t come online immediately. For example, weekly recycling and chipped bins; and bulky item pick-up won’t begin until July 2027. Discounts for low-income people apply to less than 10% at best and won’t come online for at least a year — if ever.
A million plastic containers will be recycled and a million new ones will be purchased. California’s lawsuit against big oil companies over plastics recycling tells us they will be burned. Then we’ll spend at least $15 million on new ones. Can’t we simply attach RFID chips to the existing bins?
Instead of drowning in empty promises and outright lies — many based in ignorance — let’s develop strategies that actually reduce waste and include the customers. That could build trust and generate good ideas instead of what elected officials are doing now by dividing, lying and trying to conquer.
When elected city officials roll out duplicitous, ignorant programs that drive up the cost to live here while dismissing our concerns, there’s good reason not to trust the them and scorn their stated goals.
Marty Graham is a freelance reporter, editor and author living in San Diego.
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