Following Up

 

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 12, 2026] 2026

I've written about a wide variety of subjects lately and I wanted to follow-up on some of them.

Overcharging on trash fees: I swore I wasn't going to write about the trash fee debacle again but here we go. It was recently discovered that due to a technical glitch in the data that the city gave to the county tax collector, the city overcharged many thousands of residents as much as $1,000 more on their property tax bills than they owe for the new trash fees. As it turns out, we are one of them. Others are being charged triple what they owe. Billing for trash fees on property taxes was one of the City's worst ideas ever (along with the trash fees themselves). Definitely time for a City Manager again.

US Postal Service: Back in May, I wrote a column that included the US Postal Service Tracking history of a blouse I ordered to be shipped from L.A., a mere 120 miles away. It made nine stops, traveled almost 3,500 miles and enjoyed the scenery as far away as Dallas and Fresno. I commented at the time that I hope it had enjoyed its sojourn and made some new garment friends. This shirt saw more of the North Central Plains area of Texas and the California Central Valley than most Americans.

I really (really) hoped that this was some sort of fluke. But recently a reader sent me the following message along with his USPS tracking saga.

Dear Inga,

I recently decided that instead of going to the CVS on Garnet in Pacific Beach, I would pay the $5.49 charge to have my prescription delivered to my home in the promised 3 days time. I hope that you will be able to access the journey of my prescription through the above website. In short, before reaching me it travelled from San Diego to various CVS and USPS locations in El Centro, Newark, and Springfield, Massachusetts before being delivered eight days later. I could have walked the three miles to the CVS and back in less time (if I could walk) than it took CVS to send my pills 5,000 miles on a cross-country voyage.

And I thought my blouse's deluxe sightseeing tour of America was impressive. But New Jersey? Massachusetts? Gah. I fear that neither of these stories are flukes at all. I can only surmise that whomever designed the USPS distribution system graduated in the bottom two percent of his computer science class. No surprise that USPS lost $2.5 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 (April June).

Cutting bus routes: A theme that I've written about several times is the city government's increasing willingness to not require parking in new residential or commercial development if it is within a half mile of a "transit corridor."   In La Jolla's case, that's the 30 bus. I'm a huge fan of public transportation (we never owned a car in Sweden) but it would really be a challenge for most families to rely solely on our current bus system get themselves to work, school, medical appointments, sports practices, grocery shopping etc. The buses aren't reliable enough, and don't run often enough. So imagine my dismay to open my San Diego Union-Tribune on September 18 and see the front-page story that among the newest proposed budget cuts are canceling one third (33 of 99) of the existing bus routes, and reducing service substantially on many others. News flash, city fathers/mothers: if you want the citizenry to use public transit, you have to provide it!

Usurious City fees, Parking: Our city leaders seem to have chosen parking as a way to truly irritate the constituents. Fortunately, the Balboa Park parking fiasco ends in January -  but why not sooner? The daylighting law which went into effect on January 1, 2025 - no parking within twenty feet or a marked or unmarked crosswalk - has been a source of tremendous confusion for citizens and a true boom to the city s coffers. From July 1, 2025 to February, 2026, 12,449 daylighting tickets were issued at $117.50 each. Meanwhile, only 1,000 of the affected 16,000 intersections have actually been marked 

Usurious City fees, Parking again. Posters on Next Door have been commenting on a sudden uptick of tickets - at $88 each - for inadequate wheel cramping of cars on hills. It's always been a law that you have to cramp your car s wheels on a grade of more than three percent. If parking facing downhill, wheels must be turned toward the curb; uphill, facing out. But it s suddenly being strictly enforced. La Jolla has a lot of hills so we are really low-hanging fruit on this one. And how much is three percent? Has there been an epidemic of runaway cars lately, or more likely, is this one more way to extract money from (and annoy the heck out of) the local citizenry?

None of the above: I discovered after a recent column on this subject that I'm not the only person who wishes they could vote for "none of the above"  in the upcoming elections. My Republican husband (I'm a life-long Democrat) and I have never felt so politically aligned.

And finally: The beep goes on: I recently wrote a column about all the things that beep at my house and trying to even figure out what might be beeping at any given time. One of the most annoying beep sounds was smoke alarms whose batteries seem programmed to expire at 2 a.m. emitting a water-drip-torture beep alert for the rest of the night. 

Recently, our next-door neighbor s hard-wired (not battery-operated) smoke alarm was going off while they weren't home. It could be heard several houses away, including and especially at ours. We, along with other neighbors, texted and left voice mails alerted them to this. Fortunately, the house did not appear to be on fire which would, of course, have (ultimately) resolved the problem. The husband left work to come home and deal with this and the beeping finally stopped. The wife alerted the neighbors the next day. "[Husband] did everything the internet suggested to get this thing to stop. Finally he smashed it with a hammer."   Now that's my kind of solution to annoying technology. And it had to have been so satisfying.