["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:
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