["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:
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.
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