The Aug. 26 conclusion of the lawsuit challenging San Diego’s inflated trash fee has prompted the release of new details about the cost to taxpayers of a divisive and unnecessary legal dispute.
The lawsuit was sparked by a City Council vote that approved a “world-class” trash and recycling program with new bins, weekly recycling, bulk-item pick-up, “radio frequency identification” tags and other add-ons.
Those perks — plus salaries for additional city employees to deliver the services — bumped the estimated baseline fee from about $23 a month to more than $40 monthly.
Taxpayers revolted. Facing both a ballot measure and a lawsuit, the City Council in May approved a compromise that significantly reduced both the fee and the scope of service.
The settlement scuttled the proposed ballot measure and resolved the lawsuit. But the dispute was still a drain on city finances.
Staffers in several city departments have dedicated thousands of hours to lawsuit-related tasks, and as previously reported here, the legal settlement included a $1 million payment to plaintiffs’ attorneys Mike Aguirre and Mia Severson for their fees and costs.
And new documentation released last week by the City Attorney’s office reveals an additional total payment of $725,000 to JarvisFay, the Oakland-based law firm that helped defend the city in the year-long litigation.
It took me almost three months to get copies of the invoices generated by the Oakland-based law firm. After my initial informal request on June 4, the office of City Attorney Heather Ferbert told me to file a formal Public Records Act request. In response, I received two documents that provided very general information about the council’s contract with JarvisFay.
Those documents had no information about fees and expenses paid to the firm. Ferbert argued that billing and payment information was exempt from disclosure, based on state Government Code exceptions for “confidential legal communications,” “attorney work product” and “pending litigation.”
That reasoning runs counter to state laws that encourage transparency and confidence in government. But an attorney advised me that an appeal would probably be futile, and we agreed to wait until Superior Court Judge Euketa Oliver formally dismissed the trash fee lawsuit.
To the City Attorney’s credit, her staff contacted me within days of the Aug. 26 dismissal, and sent me the monthly invoices for JarvisFay’s work.
But the documents are heavily redacted. All summaries of the work done by the firm’s lawyers are blacked out. There is no identifying information about which attorneys performed the work. It appears that the Jarvis Fay partner who handled the case billed $395 per hour for their work (a more-than-reasonable fee), the firm’s associates earned $275 per hour, and legal assistants billed at $135 per hour.
Total fees billed by JarvisFay from May 2025 through June 2026 were $646,458. That includes a monthly high of $147,740 in May of this year, during the trash fee trial.
Expenses for expert witnesses, document support, travel and other costs totaled $78,136.
Adding the $1 million paid to plaintiffs’ attorneys and the time and expense dedicated by city staff to manage the litigation and associated political fallout, the total cost of this dispute easily exceeds $2 million.
That money — and perhaps more importantly, the damage done to the city government’s credibility among skeptical taxpayers — could have been avoided if the council majority had simply honored the estimated fee spelled out in the 2022 ballot measure that asked San Diegans to approve a first-ever trash pick-up fee for single-family homeowners.
That fee was estimated at $23-29 a month, and voters approved Measure B by a less-than one-percent margin. But six council members were unable — or more likely, unwilling — to take the voters’ pulse and avoid the predictable backlash.
San Diegans didn’t share the aspiration of six council members for “locally innovative, world-class” trash service. And we never will. We just want our trash picked up on time by drivers and machinery that doesn’t crush the bins or set them back down far from the curb.
The council majority’s refusal to accept that fact caused serious harm to our trust in local government. Those elected officials also bear responsibility for a lawsuit that should have been predicted and avoided, and that inflicted significant financial pain on our already cash-strapped city.
Paul Krueger is a freelance journalist, community activist and Talmadge resident. He was one of 15 plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the trash fee. He had no role in legal strategy in that case and received no payment or benefit for his participation.
