Olof Joins The Sighted

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published July 7, 2025] 2025

Not to disparage a man I have loved and been married to for decades, but he is truly the worst patient ever.

My husband has always had a "Do not feed the lions" approach to health care and will deny all symptoms even for an affliction he actually sought medical care for. So I'll say, "What did Doctor Death say about your esophageal paralysis?"  And he'll shrug, "It didn't come up. 

My husband has had two separate cancers, along with a heart attack exacerbated by a serious head injury when he did a face plant into the armoire en route to the floor, milliseconds after insisting, "It's just heartburn!"

So talking him into undergoing the cataract surgery that he desperately needed was a multi-year battle.

Olof is a former Air Force pilot, an occupation for which one needed perfect vision, so getting him to accept that his eyesight was failing has been difficult. It had always given me an added feeling of security over the years when we were on commercial flights knowing that Olof could probably land many large aircraft in an emergency. But after a certain point, I came to realize that this would only work if he remembered to bring his reading glasses into the cockpit. Otherwise he'd be asking the flight attendant, "Does that say "up"  or "down"?"

Right around the time that Olof turned 40, I began to notice that he was leaving 70% tips at restaurants. Olof is a generous tipper but it dawned on me that the basis of his largesse was that he could no longer read the bill. This got even worse when we lived in Sweden and many of the restaurants were so low light that I'd have to read him the menu. The waiter would arrive and inquire, "And what will your father have?"  (Olof and I are exactly the same age).

Olof was the senior engineer at his company so I was surprised some years ago to get a call from a member of his team who pleaded with me to make Olof get reading glasses. Given how technical the data was on the projects they were working on, the inability to read specifications was making meetings increasingly problematical.

Maps were probably the biggest problem of all in the pre-phone app era. When we lived in Sweden, we traveled a fair amount. Fortunately, Olof had a seeing-eye wife who wore progressive lenses so that when Olof and I got really, really lost and ended up in parts of Old Tallinn that probably even the Estonians have forgotten about, I could actually read the fine print on a map. Even though Olof was by this time the owner of reading glasses, they somehow always ended up getting left back at the hotel whenever he and I are strolling around a new city. He may have been bludgeoned into getting them, but he was never going to admit he needed them. 

But over time, the necessity for reading glasses and even computer glasses came to be a part of his life, as did not being able to find any of the 10 pairs that he owned at any given time. He didn't matter how many pairs we acquired. Three months after I sold my former car, the neighbor who bought it called me and said he had found a pair of my husband s reading glasses under the front seat. 

Fast forward into the retirement years. Olof was admitting that driving at night and in rainy conditions was getting harder. He went to renew his driver's license and the DMV eye test lady said, "I m going to pass you this time, but it's a gift."

Three years ago, I started booking him appointments along with me when I went for my own yearly eye exam. The opthalmologist said, "there is no way on God s green earth you would pass a DMV eye exam at this point. You need cataract surgery."

So you re thinking Olof said, "Yes. Of course. Sign me up."

But you would be wrong.

Given our ages, we had a number of friends who had had cataract surgery, every one of whom raved about the difference it had made and how happy they were they had done it. They could see! Colors regained their actual hues and shapes their actual dimensions. It was so easy, they said. You do one eye, then the other two weeks later. The most annoying part is a month's worth of three different daily eye drops in each eye afterwards.

But three annual eye appointments went by before Olof finally consented to the surgery. He kept telling our wonderful opthalmologist that he would "think about it  and get back to her" which is Olof-ese for "you'll never hear from me again."

I've always felt that since Olof is a grown man, I should give him the respect to allow him to make these decisions himself. Even if it meant that my life, and his, and those of everyone else on the road were in extreme danger, especially at night or in the rain, or God forbid both. 

But finally I'd had enough. I called and made him an appointment with the opthalmologist and told her Olof was ready to proceed. "Really?"  she said, genuinely surprised. "He agreed?"

And when I informed Olof of "his"  decision, I was expecting pushback. I had all my arguments ready. I had rehearsed. But before I could get two of those words out, he said "okay."

I was shocked. "What do you mean, 'okay'?"  I said, suspicious. 

"I mean, okay, I'll do it,"  he replied.

Both eyes have now been done. I kept a detailed chart on the front of fridge for the schedule of all the drops. The morning after the first surgery, he could read the newspaper with no glasses. It was a miracle. The second eye went just as well.

I'm obviously incredibly pleased and relieved. The streets of San Diego are safe again. Olof has become one of the world's foremost proponents of cataract surgery.

But could we have done this three years ago?

 

Who's going to clean all this? Not me!

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 23, 2025] 2025 

We are all products of our upbringings. I grew up in the post-World War II era where women who had been in the work force could now be home raising families and aspiring to keeping an immaculate home.

My rabidly feminist mother was having none of it.

While we lived in an upper middle-class neighborhood in a commuter town outside of New York City and she didn't have to work, my mother was desperate to use her skills. Her various occupations, paid and unpaid, included teaching convicts at an area penitentiary and substitute teaching junior high (is there a parallel there?) 

But she was most passionate about teaching ESL (English as a second language) and tutoring, on her own time, many of her students to pass the written driver's exam which in that era had to be taken in English. Given the lack of public transit in our area, a driver's license was essential to getting any kind of good job. Her efforts included teaching them to drive in our car. I think my mother could yell STOP! in eight languages. When we all left home, she went back to teaching full time at the college level.

What she wasn't interested in, however, was cleaning.

Every so often, Dad used to go around and sweep the cobwebs out of the corners with a broom. People didn't commonly have cleaning help in our area then and I'm not sure my mother would have wanted it anyway. Child labor was heavily utilized. I have no desire to ever again strip wax off a floor (thank you polyurethane!) or dust slatted blinds.

Every time a vacuum cleaner salesman would come by, touting his guarantees that the machine could clean anything, Mom would cheerfully invite him in and promise to buy his machine if it could remove any of the multitude of pet-and-child-inflicted stains which formed a continuous stretch of Rorschach-like blotches along the pale gray of the family room carpet. She never had to buy a new vacuum cleaner (we already owned one anyway) and would escort the frustrated salesman to the door looking distinctly apologetic.

I am her daughter. And I have similar conversations with my husband. 

Olof has always maintained that he picked after-dinner clean-up as his retirement chore partly because he read that, in recorded history, no man has ever been shot by his wife while doing the dishes. He never said so out loud but he was also apparently never all that happy with the job I did with them either. (We can put someone on the moon but we can't invent a machine that cleans the counters, stove top, and sink too?)

I truly feel that spending a half hour on kitchen cleanup is time that could be used far more wisely. Like reading War and Peace with a snifter of Laphroaig. Or in my case, People with a glass of Chardonnay.

When Olof is done, the stove top is spotless, the counter tops positively sparkle, and you could be blinded by the shine in our stainless-steel sink. And then listen to this - he sweeps the kitchen floor. Whether it needs it or not. As you might guess, our definitions of "needing" vary. Olof will sweep whether you can see a single crumb on the floor. "Part of the job,"  he says.

In my defense, it's not like I never sweep. Just recently I dropped a box of breakfast cereal on the floor which was more than I thought the dog could - or should - eat. As I maneuvered the broom, Olof happened to wander into the kitchen. "Whoa!"  he said, in mock astonishment. "I didn't know you knew how to use that thing!"

From time to time, I cruise the Home and Garden Channel and watch shows about people who are shopping for a house. When I see people oohing and aahing about a 5,000 square foot home with bathrooms larger than our living room and massive foyers and kitchens suitable for restaurants, all I can think of: who is going to clean all that?

Some of these newer homes will have a footed tub inside a shower room . Somebody is going to have to crawl behind that thing. That person would most definitely not be me.

The whole cleaning thing comes up in odd ways. I was reading my grandchildren the Curious George book, "Curious George gets a medal", in which Curious George spills ink on the floor and decides to clean it up by pouring a big box of soap over it then pulling the hose through the window turning the entire room into a lake. On the second to last page of the book, there is the line:  "A newspaperman took [George's] picture and everybody shouted and cheered, even the farmer and his son and the kind woman from next door (who had worked for hours to get the water out of the room)."   (Italics mine.)

I was outraged. Why is the kind woman next door cleaning up this mess? Why not the Man with the Yellow Hat who owns the damn monkey? I explained to the grandkids that he should have taken responsibility for cleaning this up himself rather than foisting it off on some poor neighbor woman who probably got this token mention as an afterthought. She should definitely have been paid going rates and had a bigger shout out than some measly parenthetical thank you.

I had also noticed a blurb in US Magazine back in March about how actress Selena Gomez'  fiance, Benny Blanco, gifted her on Valentine s Day with an entire bathtub of queso, with a trail of tortilla chips spelling out "I love you."   Selena, sweetheart: DO NOT MARRY THIS GUY! I realize you folks have "people", but someone - probably a bunch of someones and almost certainly female someones - had to extricate congealed cheddar from an entire tub. There is not a shop vac on the planet that is that cheese-capable. I can't even imagine that the tub's plumbing ever even worked the same.

Now if Benny wanted to clean it up himself...

 

New Trash Fee System: Your Head Will Explode

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 16, 2025] 2025

On June 9, the San Diego City Council voted 6-3 to approve trash fees for 223,000 single family homes as part of Measure B, which was approved by voters by a squeaker margin of 50.5-49.5% in 2022. The actual costs will be double or triple Measure B's estimates and are mired in bureaucratic convolution so mind-numbing it made my head want to explode. Yours will too.

If the accurate figures for these costs had been presented to the voters, it wouldn't have had a snowball's chance of passing. This is exactly why it should have been put to a re-vote. Or at the very least, the fees kept at the level that were voted for.

The city needs money. Duping the citizenry is a pretty low way to get it. Even the people who voted for it didn't vote for this.

I've written two double-length columns on this topic already so I won't cover all the issues involved again. The level of deceit of this entire plan is mind boggling.

The city paid a staggering $4.5 million to a consulting firm to estimate the fees that would be charged. Afterwards, the consultant mea culpa-ed his gross miscalculations with "Sorry. I'm human."  Just wondering if he's giving the $4.5 million back to the city? It could sure use the money.

The affected homeowners were allegedly sent a six-page flier with the details of the new plan and a protest form on page six that could be cut out, filled in, and snail-mailed to the city clerk's office. Most people thought it was junk mail and threw it out. Lots of people (including me, and I was on the lookout for it) didn't receive it. Few people had the fortitude to wade through the soul crushing five pages of details.

For enough protest votes to count, 111,000 people would have had to send that form in. According to the City Clerk s office, "only"  46,000 did.

But wait! While the form asked only for a name, it came out later that the protest form had to indicate the name of the property as listed on county property tax rolls. So if it were a trust, that had to be indicated, otherwise the protest vote wouldn't be counted. Inquiring minds want to know: how many such protest votes weren't counted?

And in the sleaziest move yet, anyone who didn't send in a protest vote was counted as a yes vote for the new fees. This is truly an insult to the democratic process. It was stacked against any possibility of there being 111,000 protest votes.

One of the biggest downsides to the new fee structure is the plan to save billing costs by charging the fees on property tax bills, with adjustments only coming months - or years - after the fact. This is just the wrong place for trash fees to be charged and are pretty much guaranteed to create massive headaches for homeowners. Here s why:

Affected home owners are being offered three bundle options with options to add additional bins at additional cost. Bundle 3, the default option, includes three 95-gallon bins (one green, one blue, one black). In teeny 8-point font below the table are three very important footnotes which should actually be in 16-point bold-face font at the top:

Footnote 1: The City proposes to provide recycling and organics [green bin] collection at the service level of 95-gal containers only. Customers may request a 35-gal or 65-gal recycling and/or organics container at the same time if they prefer a small container for reasons unrelated to solid waste services, for example, if they would like a smaller size due to space considerations. However, all customers will be charged at the 95-gal container rate for recycling and organics collection services. [Italics mine]

Footnote 2: Under the proposed rate plan, the City would charge all customers at the Bundle Option 3: 95-gal container rate during Fiscal Year 2026. Customers will be asked to select a service level and bundled rate option during Fiscal Year 2026. Customers that select the 35-gal or 65-gal service level for their trash container will receive a credit on their Fiscal 2027 bill [italics mine] for the difference between the rates associated with their selected service level and the 95-gal service level for the period of time between when the customers subscribed to and received the smaller containers and the end of Fiscal Year 2026. [Translation: you re going to be charged the maximum rate and wait at least a year to get this credit.]

Footnote 3: Customers that select additional containers beyond the initial bundle will receive a debit on their Fiscal Year 2027 bill for the cost of the additional container for the period of time between when the customers subscribed to and received the additional containers and the end of Fiscal Year 2026.

Who in God s name came up with this insane plan? And can they be legally enjoined from ever being involved in city planning again?

Are people in condo complexes subjected to this kind of convoluted billing? Don't think so.

I, for example, need two 95-gallon green bins (big yard), plus a 65-gallon black bin (we're retired, just the two of us) plus two 35-gallon blue recycling bins since that is what fits in our limited space. The City stopped issuing that size blue bin some years ago so after the trucks destroyed the city-issued ones, I had to pay $120 each at Home Depot for replacement ones that are compatible with the city's trash trucks. They're practically new but now about to be obsolete (see below) and replaced with new city-issued bins for which I will have to pay $13.78 (now) per month (going up to $17.74 per month in 2028) in perpetuity.

Why can't I keep my new blue bins? All blue recycling bins and black trash bins are to be replaced and new ones provided with RFID (Radio frequency identification) sensors. I've made several jokes in previous columns about our trash spying on us, wondering if the garbage police will show up if a green bin-designated banana peel is sensed in a black bin, or God forbid, a blue recycle bin. But it is unclear exactly how these sensors will work. The sensors will not be in the green (greenery-food waste) bins presumably because these bins are fairly new. Are these sensors bar codes? Or? Can the city's notorious trash bin-destroying trucks disable them? Can people steal other people's bins so that someone else is being charged for your trash? Honestly, I haven t been able to find out any real information about how they will work.

A really really important question that hasn't been addressed in all this is what happens to the half million to million old blue and black bins that are going to be replaced, especially if one of the motivations of the new system is supposed to be landfill reduction, A June 8 article in the Times of San Diego noted: 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. This is a horrifying possibility.

The same article queries: Can't we simply attach RFID chips to the existing bins?

The fee structure doesn't take into account people, say, retirees living alone who generate very little trash. You're paying anyway.

By the way, the weekly recycling program that was a draw to many isn't scheduled to start until the summer of 2027.

As for poor people or those on fixed incomes, the city documents proposes setting aside $3 million for a financial assistance program that would provide a full subsidy for about 2% of customers, a 50% subsidy for 3.5% of customers, and a 20% subsidy for 10% of customers. How that will all work out in reality is still being determined. And here s the deal: you re probably going to have to pay up front now and wait a considerable amount of time for a credit on your tax bill.

The three City Council members who voted against the new fee plan are Raul Campillo, Henry Foster, and Marni Von Wilpert. Those voting for it are Sean Elo-Rivera, Jennifer Campbell, Kent Lee, Stephen Whitburn, Vivian Moreno, and La Jolla's own City Councilman Joe LaCava, who has been an active supporter of this perfidious plan.

I've previously been a huge fan of Joe LaCava in his capacity as a community volunteer and I voted for him for City Council. Right now I wouldn't vote for him for Supervisor of Waste Water Management. Or then, maybe I would.

Twenty-two percent of those 223,000 single family homes have renters in them. They can expect their already-astronomical rents to go up commensurately.

On June 24, the City Council will approve the plan to collect the new fees on your property tax bill, and on July 1 the whole new plan becomes effective.

On May 19, five home owners engaged the services of the law firm of former City Attorney Michael Aguirre to file a lawsuit accusing Mayor Gloria and others of violating Proposition 218, a ballot measure passed some 30 years ago, that prohibits government agencies from charging more for services than the actual cost of delivering those services. The five plaintiffs are asking the Superior Court judge to render the city s previous approval of the trash fee null and void. Is it too late?

I can't even imagine a plan more devious, inept, and just plain unworkable and incomprehensible that could have been inflicted on the citizenry than this one. Regardless of how you feel about trash fees, the whole thing is just plain wrong.

 

 

The Mystery Of The Missing Altoids

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 9, 2025] 2025

Today marks my 560th "Let Inga Tell You" column for the La Jolla Light since I began writing it sixteen years ago.

I have to say, the first 250 were the easiest. 

I'm always on the lookout for column material given that I truly, really have no life. So a few weeks ago, when I was out front watering the azaleas and letting the dog run around the front yard, I noticed a very serious-minded young couple intently focused on their phones approach the bike route sign across the street, and suddenly exclaim with jubilation that seemed wildly out of proportion to the circumstances, "Oh my god! Yes! This is it!"

Intrigued, I continued overwatering my plants just to see what it was. It looked a lot like a bike route sign to me. Ignoring the screams of my azaleas to "Turn OFF the hose already!", I watched as the couple felt the metal pole up and down. Then they beat the bushes behind the sign. They even got down on the on the ground and dug around the base. This went on for an hour.

Finally, in my signature shy and retiring way, I queried, "What is it you re looking for?" The wife (I assumed wife) briefly explained that it was a "geo test."  She said they have this all over the world. You get (coordinates?) of something and the adventure is in finding it.

Afterwards, I Googled what I think was the app they were using and got: The Geo Test App is a tool that allows developers and testers to perform manual and automated geolocation testing. It includes 300+ different games to test your map skills. You can simulate user behavior from different locations by testing with secure, private IPs hosted in 45+ countries around the world.

I, of course, being Techno Moron to the Stars, had never heard of Geo Test. It sounds like a digital treasure hunt? Or maybe a cardio Where s Waldo?

Turns out there is no prize, other than the satisfaction of actually locating the item according to the... coordinates? (I am so out of my league here.) No mention of then going to the nearest bar to celebrate. When I was their age, all celebrations involved libations. 

The wife explained that they had successfully located their previous two... whatevers. But this one was truly stymying them. It HAD to be RIGHT HERE. They were SURE of it. 

So, ever the annoying spectator that people who do Geo Tests regard as the downside of their hobby, I pushed on: so are you looking for an actual object? For all I knew, something would ding or buzz or light up on their phones when they'd found the target.

Apparently, there was indeed an actual object they were supposed to locate: an Altoids tin. Presumably empty? You probably know the tag line: "Altoids: Curiously strong mints."  And if you've ever had one, they most definitely are.

As I continued to drown the azaleas in my fascination with the drama across the street, I momentarily thought of offering the services of my dog, Lily, who was deliriously happy at getting all this bonus bark-at-the-gate time.

Dogs, you may know, have an olfactory sense that is literally 7,000 times stronger than humans (although I m not sure how anyone actually measured that). Yes, this was a job for a dog. No way a dog would miss the scent of Altoids. Unless, of course, the scent actually gave the dog a fatal asthma attack with its intensity. 

OK, so maybe not a great idea. Dog noses most definitely did not evolve on scents like mints. In fact, back in column number 404 (June 10, 2021), I addressed the whole issue of the difficulties pet food makers have in making pet foods that smell disgusting enough to appeal to dogs but not so bad that it will repel their owners. Among the "palatants" added to dog food can be such colorless flavorings as "putrescine"  and "cadaverine."   Yum-mo.

I don't think even Altoids could cover up these scents. Which may explain why dogs have such terrible breath.

Anyway, if I understood this correctly from the wife, the whole thing about this Geo Test thing is that you're supposed to find the target but LEAVE IT THERE. The lovely young couple finally had to conclude that someone had swiped it from where it was secured to the bike route sign or the nearby surroundings. Was this Geo Test terrorism? Satellite sabotage? Just plain bad sportsmanship?

Or did some well-meaning local La Jollan on his/her daily constitutional happen to notice an Altoid tin tethered to a bike route sign, sigh in disbelief that people are such slobs, and dispose of it as his/her civic duty? Or hope it had been left by the Mint Fairy and was theirs for the taking? Maybe even mistaken it for a drug drop?

Inquiring and pathologically-over-active minds want to know.

So if you were a fellow Geo Test app-er and maliciously mint-mooched it to thwart your fellow Geo Testers, BRING IT BACK RIGHT NOW!

Alternatively, if you might have been that Altoid-appropriating tin-tampering Samaritan who inadvertently threw it out, the next time you're at CVS, please buy some Altoids, dump the mints, and cable tie it to the bike route sign again. Those poor kids were so disappointed. 

Or maybe I should do it? It might be the most exciting thing I do all week in my (truly, really) non-life. And best case, generate column number 561.

 

 

 

Still Fighting The Good Fight Against Trash Fees

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published May 26, 2025] 2025

After I published my May 15 column asking affected home owners to file a protest form against the new trash fees, I heard from several people who proffered that the odds were so stacked against 111,000 protest votes being submitted (and more on that anon) that the only likely way to stop this bait-and-switch-on-steroids was through legal means.

And frankly, I couldn't have agreed more. But could such actions even legally be done? None of us had any idea.

I was therefore delighted to open my May 20 San Diego Union-Tribune and see, right on the front page, that five San Diego residents (Mary Brown, Scott Case, Patty Ducey-Brooks, Lisa Mortensen, and Valorie Seyfert) had engaged the services of the law firm of former City Attorney Michael Aguirre and his law partner, Maria Severson to protest these fees.

The lawsuit accuses Mayor Gloria and others of violating Proposition 218, a ballot measure passed some 30 years ago, that prohibits government agencies from charging more for services than the actual cost of delivering those services. The five plaintiffs are asking the Superior Court judge to render the city's previous approval of the trash fee null and void.

If they are successful, and the city wants to revisit the issue of trash fees, any proposed system must be accurately and transparently communicated, unlike Measure B. Lionel Prout Jr. made an excellent case for how this should be done in the Letters to the Editor on May 22.

According to the current trash fee plan, my 2025 annual costs would be $737.64 going up to $901.44 in 2028 not the (average) $25 per month or $300 per year that was proposed on Measure B. 

Time is rapidly running out and I genuinely fear that despite a grass roots efforts from the 223,000 affected home owners, articles and editorials in the San Diego Union-Tribune firmly against the new trash fee system, never mind hundreds of irate Next Door posts, that it could still pass a vote of our nine City Councilmen on June 9. Protest votes are still important despite the recent legal action.

My May 15 column dealt with the vagaries of the Measure B trash plan in some detail, but let's recap. Here's my unapologetically-jaded view of how this all went down:

The City of San Diego found itself short of money so they decided to fund-raise with new trash fees. Deceitfully inaccurate estimates for this service were dangled in front of the city populace in the form of Measure B in 2022, and astonishingly, it squeaked by 50.5-49.5 %.

Oddly, considering that they were trying to raise money, the city blew $4.2 million on an Independent Budget Analysis (IBA) study on how it would all work.

But oops! Turns out these financial master minds didn't carry the two in those calculations. In reality, it was going to cost two to three times that amount. They realize that affected households wouldn't be too happy about this epic bait and switch.

So how to get around that? they wonder. They devise a brilliantly perfidious plan where they purport to send the affected households a flier with five pages of new details never included in the original Measure B, arrayed in mind-numbing tables, footnotes, "bundle" options, and even a frankly puzzling plan to replace at least 450,000 current blue and black bins (2 per household minimum) with new bins that would have sensors to track the customers. Exactly what they will be tracking is not in any of those tables or footnotes in pages 1-5.

It's official, folks: we are now being spied on by our trash.

There is also no mention of what will happen to those at-least 450,000 now-obsolete replaced bins: mulch? Land fill? Homeless shelters? This is actually a really important question.

Predicting that there might be the teeniest amount of push back on the greatly inflated rates when the populace receives the fliers which have been cleverly disguised as junk mail and seemingly only sent to random addresses, a protest form is inserted on the last page where it will only be seen by customers who actually received the flier (many didn't) and whose heads haven't exploded by then from pages 1-5.

In a scheme of admirable cunning, the only way for the new trash fee plan not to be implemented is for 111,000 customers to cut out the form, fill it out, stick it in an envelope with a stamp, and physically mail it via the ever-reliable US Postal Service and sent to a mail stop at the City Clerk s office where we're sure someone is keeping a very accurate tally. The creators of this plan were counting on the fact that many households in this digital age no longer stock postage stamps (or envelopes) or have any idea whether their nearest local postal box might actually be, hence only the most irascible of curmudgeons would make the effort.

And by the way, only protest forms that contain the name of a household's trust will be counted even though the form doesn't ask for it. Just the owner s name.

But here's where it gets deliciously fiendish: if an affected home owner doesn't return the protest form that he/she never got, it's counted as a yes vote for the new rates! No vote is a yes vote! There should be some kind of award for this. I can still hear these IBA guys cackling with glee. 

But when customers started to complain en masse, the IBA guy who got paid $4.2 million to mis-estimate the costs by enough to fill every pot hole in Greater San Diego County, merely shrugged and said, "Sorry. I'm human." Then he retired in Fiji. OK, I made that last part up.

In the April 15 City Council meeting, six of our city council persons voted to put this new plan forward. Those would be none other than our District 1 Councilman, Joe LaCava, along with Jennifer Campbell, Henry L. Foster, Stephen Whitburn, Kent Lee, and Sean Elo-Rivera.

No votes were cast by Raul Campillo, Marni Von Wilpert and Vivian Moreno although there is no guaranteed they will vote no again. (But please encourage them to do so.)

Unlike the onerous snail mail method of filing a protest, you can contact each of the nine City Council members individually at the link below:

https://www.sandiego.gov/contact

I have always had nothing but admiration for Joe LaCava over the years and am genuinely puzzled as to why he would be actively promoting a plan so patently deceitful and which impacts his own constituents financially more than any other district.

His email address is:  joelacava@sandiego.gov Please let him know what you think, and why you expect him to vote no on June 9 if it comes to a vote despite the impending litigation.

Regardless of whether you re OK with paying trash fees or not, the Measure B proposed implementation is a profoundly ill-conceived plan which multiple media outlets have delineated in detail. It is a terrible precedent for the city to get away with duping the citizenry on a ballot measure to the degree that this one has done.

Please continue to send in your protest votes if you haven't already. The more that are received, the stronger the citizens case. You can find it on this link:

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/measure-b-prop-218-mailer.pdf

And finally: inquiring minds need to know: how on earth did the post-Measure B study cost $4 million? If we have to do this all over again, I'm volunteering to do it for two.

 

 

 

The Plight Of The Middle Child

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published May 19, 2025] 2025

I'm a middle child so I m always interested in studies about birth order, and particularly, middle child syndrome. And yes, there apparently is one.

Middle children in general are thought to be the peace makers but also the forgotten children, hence needing to develop resilience, independence and social skills so they can be seen and heard.

Obviously, much depends on how many children are in a family, something that is known in scientific circles as "sibship size."  In a family of eight, there's a lot of middle kids.

But in my case, I was the true middle child. My Protestant mother had to agree to raise us as Catholics when she married my Catholic father, but after three kids in three and a half years, she underwent a profound spiritual conversion and became one of the world's foremost proponents of birth control. She was watching her sisters-in-law have a child a year (one had nine before her female parts gave out) and Mom was already feeling that three might be two too many in such a short period of time.

I was a blue-eyed blond in a family of brown-eyed brunettes, the creamy blond filling in the family Oreo. (OK, so we may be mixing some metaphors here.) My mother endured a lot of milk man jokes but if she could be getting it on with the milk man with an infant at home, then more power to her.

I not only didn't look like anybody else in the family (people always assumed I was my sister s visiting friend given our proximity in ages) but my skill sets were vastly different than my siblings as well. They were very quick learners; I was a plodder. I, however, had natural social skills that they struggled with.

My parents met in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown University and I think had expectations of at least moderately intelligent children.

While my siblings tested into the stratosphere on IQ tests, the school s guidance counselor informed my mother that "two out of three ain't bad."   Mom was advised to (waaay) lower her expectations where I was concerned. Vocational school could be a good fit, or perhaps one of the less demanding state schools.

My parents, being educationally aspirational, refused to believe I was as dumb as I tested. But I think there may have been some unstated concern that babies had been switched at birth. Somewhere out there was a family of blond dumdums who inexplicably ended up with a brunette genius.

There were always at least three trips a week to the Pleasantville Public Library where my mother and sibs stocked up on new reading material. I did too, but I read one book to their five.

Somehow the family speed reading gene seemed to have missed me. I liked reading but I read slowly and with my lips.

As the blond sheep of the family, I was sometimes the target of my siblings touting their superior reading-acquired vocabulary. (And yes, you do acquire an amazing vocabulary if you read a lot.) Our dog, Josephine Bonaparte, was misbehaving one day, and I announced, "Josephine, you are a recalcitrant animal!"  ( Recalcitrant being one of the vocabulary words in English class that week.)

Everyone looked up from their books. "Whoa! Inga said a big word!"   (Then they went right back to reading.)

Reading a recent article on middle child syndrome, I was interested to learn that the three qualifiers include feeling overlooked, struggling to find their place (i.e. finding it harder to figure out what is unique or special about them) and feeling like they aren't getting enough attention (although the first and third seem kind of the same to me.)

I knew what was unique or special about me: I was the family idiot. I think my parents, who loved me and supported me in everything I did, would be horrified to think I saw myself that way but my siblings were truly human encyclopedias.

Of course, I wasn't an idiot. But in my family I was a relative idiot. It's a thing.

Ironically, I was always a much better student than either of my siblings, grade-wise. It s amazing what dogged determination will do for you. In fact, it was my signature pathological persistence (my husband's term) that finally got our streetlight fixed last year after more than 100 hours and a year of effort. Do not try to outlast me. I never give up.

So was that the upside in my personal journey as a middle child? Like the old Avis slogan, "We try harder,"  did I have to put in more effort to achieve the same results as my brilliant sibs?

As a postscript, I confess I was secretly relieved when both my sister and I signed up for 23andme and matched as siblings. I would never have thought my mother really got it on with the milk man. But that switched baby thing could really happen. Probably especially after the Second World War when a billion people were having babies (like me) in way-overcrowded maternity wards.

Interestingly, one of my sons is very much like me: blue-eyed, blond, very creative. The hazel-eyed brunette son bears no resemblance to me in appearance, talents, or personality.

The one who's like me is adopted.

 

Bait, Switch and Extort: Please Protest The New Trash Fees

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published May 12, 2025] 2025

In November of 2022, San Diego voters passed Measure B by a squeaker 50.5 percent vote allowing the City of San Diego to charge 222,485 single family home owners for trash pickup. It wasn't as though home owners previously got free service. It was considered to be part of our property tax bill.

The proposed monthly fee cited on Measure B for single family home owners was projected to be $23-$29 per month. Now that the new fees are about to be implemented, the fees are going to be more than double that - even triple or more if you have more than three total Environmental Services bins - and going up yearly probably in perpetuity. La Jollans, whose larger properties tend to generate more yard waste, will be especially financially affected.

Nobody voted for this. Not even the people who voted for it voted for this. The proposed new system isn't just bait and switch, it's bait and switch and extort.

The 233,000 affected property owners have until June 9 to protest the new fee system. But fifty-percent (111,243) of us will have to do so by the deadline. Read below to see how (it's actually very easy.)

Failure to return the protest form is considered a Yes vote for the new trash fees!

Allegedly, all affected homeowners received a six-page flier regarding the new rules on or about April 25. I say this because even though I was alerted to it and was on the lookout for it, we did not receive it. Many other people thew it away thinking it was junk mail. Fortunately, you can resurrect it with this link:

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/measure-b-prop-218-mailer.pdf

Reading through all six pages will make your head explode. Honestly, whoever designed this mind-numbing incomprehensible plan should be banished to a desert island where they will hopefully be devoured by wildlife. But on the sixth and last page of this document - where they hope you have already lost your will to live during the first five pages and will never ever see it - is a protest form which asks for your name, address or parcel number, and signature. It must be mailed in to the address on the form or hand delivered by June 9 to be counted. Only one form may be submitted for each owned parcel.

Please, please do this. Even if you are OK with paying for trash pickup, this is a terrible plan.

If you don't want to use the actual form, you can also just write on a piece of paper: I (name and name of trust if house is in a trust) oppose adoption of the proposed solid waste management fee. Write your address or Assessor s Parcel, and sign. Mail to: Office of the City Clerk, 202 C St., MS 2T, San Diego, CA 92101.

One important note about the protest form: The County Clerk s office, upon query, stated: "For properties held in trust, the protest should be signed by the Trustee, or other person legally authorized to act on behalf of the trust, and it should include the name of the trust as it is listed on the last equalized secured property tax assessment roll.  Only one protest per parcel will be counted. Protests submitted by email, facsimile, or as a photocopy (i.e., the signature is a photocopy) will not be counted."  

But nowhere is this information included on the actual protest form which simply says I (no mention of including a trust name). Will these weasels not count forms sent in that only include the name of the owner and not the trust info? Could/should this be a disqualifier of the entire proposed plan?

Among the many many things wrong with the new plan is that the fees will show up your property tax bill so that the city doesn't have to pay for billing. Corrections or credits to fees will take a full year to show up on your next year s tax bill. So if you sell your property, will the new owners be the beneficiaries of your credits?

Measure B made no mention of requiring people to choose among three "Bundles", depending on the size of Environmental Services containers you have/need, with each additional bin an additional monthly fee. But you have to pay for three containers regardless.

Table 1 on page four of the flier shows the increase in costs of the three bundles and add-on bins for the next four years. The cost of each of the bundles goes up 5% from 2025-26, a whopping 19% from 2026-27, and another 3-4% from 2027-28. No mention of fees from 2029 into forever.

My current two 95-gallon green bins and one 95-gallon black bin fall into Bundle 3. Adding in my two 35-gallon blue bins (which, by the way, I paid for personally since ES discontinued this size some years ago) would be an additional $13.88 per month, making my 2025 monthly costs $61.47, my 2026 monthly costs $63.91, my 2027 monthly costs $73.30, and my 2028 monthly costs $75.12. I could probably downsize the 95-gallon black bin to a 65-gallon one but the chaos this would likely inflict on my tax bill, never mind hold time with all those new customer service people, probably isn't worth it. I just don't think I have the mental bandwidth.

And it even gets worse than this. Part of the cost being assessed is replacing all of the current black trash and blue recycle bins regardless of condition with new bins equipped with special computer chips to allow the city to keep track of customers.

What? Even my trash is spying on me now? Just what kind of track are they going to be keeping?

And what about the two almost-new 35-gallon blue recycling bins that I had to purchase at Home Depot after the city trash trucks destroyed the two they had originally dispensed to me but no longer provide. Are they now obsolete?

And what happens to tens of thousands of blue and black bins being replaced?

Ironically, the taxpayers paid $4.2 million to an Independent Budget Analyst (IBA) to study this situation and estimate the costs of this program. The guy was millions of dollars off. The San Diego-Union Tribune in a May 4 article quoted the IBA, Jordan More, who created the wildly inaccurate estimates, with "Mea culpa. I am human."

WTF? Is this the new national mantra? I can hear my parents voices from their graves: "Human is a given. Ineptitude is not."   Are 233,000 single family homeowners supposed to be paying for this mistake in perpetuity?

To be slightly fair, there are some new benefits with this plan, including free replacement of our bins after the trash trucks destroy them instead of having to pay for them as is currently the case. I'm not sure why this would matter as nowhere in the proposed service changes is the promise to create trucks that don't destroy the containers in the first place. Do we really need that much velocity?

The new fees will, however, give us weekly recycling pickup instead of alternate week.  We'll also get curbside pickup of "up to two bulky items per year."   Frankly, I could do without both of those for the money being charged.

I was amused to read that the new fees will provide customer service representatives to meet the anticipated "increased demand in inquiries."   Do ya think? If you need six pages and multiple footnotes to describe a new bundles system, you can be sure you re going to get plenty of calls.

Another use of the new fees, you'll be pleased to hear, is for saving to prepare for "future costs and reserves."   Yup, thrilled to be paying for that. I'll probably be dead!

As noted above, even the people who voted for this didn't vote for what is being proposed now that they secured voter approval.

If enough affected property owners file protests in time, the current Proposed Solid Waste Management Fee will be canceled or at least revisited. And it should be 

As a poster on local social media noted:

Voters can't give informed consent if the information they are given is wrong or incomplete. Proposition campaigns must be based on clear, accurate information. If the government lowballs the cost during the election and raises it afterward, it damages public trust. Ethically, a government that misleads voters should not be allowed to profit from that deception. When voters make decisions based on false expectations, the result does not reflect the true will of the people. Measure B's implementation should either be canceled or require a revote this time with full disclosure of the real financial impacts. Voters deserved honest information when making their choice, and they didn't get it.

I couldn't agree more.

 Protest form: