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: