After my May 15 column in which I asked the 223,000 affected homeowners to file a protest form against the city of San Diego’s planned new trash fee, I heard from several people who proffered that the odds were so stacked against the required 111,000-plus protest votes being submitted 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 action be done? None of us had any idea.
I was therefore delighted on May 20 to see 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, former assistant city attorney Maria Severson, to challenge the fee.
The lawsuit accuses Mayor Todd Gloria and others of violating Proposition 218, a ballot measure ed 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 a Superior Court judge to render the city’s advancement of the typical $47.59-per-month trash fee null and void.
If they are successful and the city wants to revisit the issue, any proposed system must be accurately and transparently communicated, unlike Measure B, the 2022 ballot measure that allowed the city to charge single-family households a fee for trash service.
Local resident Lionel Prout Jr. made an excellent case for how this should be done in a letter to the editor in the La Jolla Light 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 estimated in Measure B.
The fee could still a vote of San Diego’s nine City Council when they again take up the matter Monday, June 9. Time is rapidly running out, and I genuinely fear it will , despite grassroots efforts from affected homeowners, many articles about and editorials against the new fee system and hundreds of irate posts on social media. Protest votes are still important, despite the 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 opinion on how all this went down:
The city of San Diego found itself short of money so decided to raise funds with a new trash fee. Deceitfully inaccurate estimates for this service were dangled in front of the city populace in the form of Measure B, which squeaked by 50.5-49.5%.
Oddly, considering that they were trying to raise money, city officials blew more than $4 million on a study on how it would all work and how much it would cost homeowners.
But oops! Turns out it was going to cost over twice the minimum $23 per month the independent budget analyst’s office had estimated.
They realized that affected households wouldn’t be too happy about this epic bait and switch.
So how to get around that? They devised a brilliantly perfidious plan in which they would send the affected households a flier with five pages of new details never included in the original Measure B description, arrayed in mind-numbing tables, footnotes, “bundle” options and even a puzzling plan to replace at least 450,000 current blue recycling and black trash bins (two 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.
So we are now to be spied on by our trash.
There is also no mention of what will happen to those 450,000-plus obsolete replaced bins. Mulch? Landfill? Homeless shelters? This is actually a really important question.
Expecting there might be the teeniest amount of pushback on the greatly inflated rates when the populace received the fliers, which were cleverly disguised as junk mail and seemingly not sent to all affected addresses, a protest form was inserted on the last page, where it would be seen only by customers who actually received the flier and whose heads hadn’t exploded by reading the previous pages.
In a scheme of irable cunning, the only way for the new trash fee plan not to be implemented would be for at least 111,500 customers to cut out the form, fill it out, stick it in an envelope with a stamp and mail it via the ever-reliable U.S. Postal Service to a mail stop at the city clerk’s office, where we’re sure someone is keeping a very accurate tally.
Hence, in this digital age when many people no longer stock postage stamps or envelopes or have any idea where their nearest postal box might be, only the most irascible of curmudgeons would make the effort.
And by the way, protest forms from households in a trust must contain the name of the trust to 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 homeowner doesn’t return the protest form, it’s counted as a “yes” vote for the new fee! No vote is a yes vote! There should be some kind of an award for this.
At the April 14 City Council meeting, six of our council voted to put this new plan forward. Those would be none other than our District 1 councilman, Joe LaCava, along with Jennifer Campbell, Henry 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 guarantee they will vote no again. (But please encourage them to do so.)
Unlike the onerous snail mail method of filing a protest, you can each of the nine City Council at sandiego.gov/.
I have always had nothing but iration for Joe LaCava over the years and am genuinely puzzled as to why he would be actively promoting a plan so patently deceitful that impacts his constituents financially possibly more than any other district.
His email address is [email protected]. 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 litigation.
Regardless of whether you’re OK with paying trash fees, this proposal is profoundly ill-conceived. It is a terrible precedent for the city to get away with duping the citizenry on a ballot measure to this degree.
Please continue to send in your protest forms if you haven’t already. The more that are received, the stronger the citizens’ case. You can find it at this link: bit.ly/3Sj2eLz.
And finally, inquiring minds need to know: How on Earth did the post-Measure B “study” cost over $4 million? If we have to do this all over again, I’m volunteering to do it for no more than $2 million.
Inga’s looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at [email protected]. ♦
