San Diego’s New Trash Fee Proposal Is a Bunch of Garbage

Editordude: Lisa Mortensen often writes open letters to our San Diego City Councilmembers; here’s her latest.

By Lisa Mortensen / April 16, 2025

Good morning council members:

I wanted to take a moment and thank you, Mr. Campillo, Ms. Moreno and Ms. Van Wilpert for speaking out against the city’s new trash program that the council voted to move forward on April 14th.  Your remarks and reasoning are a few of the viable points why this proposal should be torn up and put in the shredder.

It is obvious that the measure had gross inaccuracies as per the monthly fee, in addition to other wording that was ‘deemed reliable but not guaranteed’. Sadly, this fudging of facts by city hall was for the benefit of Todd Gloria to curry favor with the city’s unions in order to get their vote for his mayoral re-election.  I would imagine the councilmembers in district 3 and district 9 also wanted to give their re-election campaigns a boost of support from their coworkers. Pure and simple. This political trickery is now being rolled out at a time that will further burden homeowners dealing with rapidly increasing prices for necessity goods and services and a looming threat of recession as is described in the political cartoon below.

So, what the city is saying is, they want to gain revenue to plug up the budget deficit on the backs of single-family homeowners and keeping this in-house would provide that reward.    I’m not sure why Todd targets single family homeowners since, we are the ones who pay the largest share toward the salaries for all employees at city hall through our property taxes.  Todd, not being a homeowner, may not know this.

The city basically has denied single family homeowners from having a choice of disposal services while all other property owners who live in planned residential developments, condos, 2-4 units, or apartment buildings have the choice to use private disposal companies.   Our elected officials at city hall tout the importance of equity but I question where the equity is here?

Another talking point from city hall is “the fact that our city is more spread out than other cities, we will need to pay more”.  That statement can be debunked by two points:

1.  We have more people served which means the city will receive more revenue than the other cities;  and

2.  The city is comparing apples to oranges when they reason this increase due to our city’s size and not due to the primary fact that the city will hire over 100 new employees that the city will need to implement the program in addition to the monetary set aside for pensions.  That’s where the true cost difference lies.  Which is why the other astute municipals in our county have chosen privately run programs so they will not be burdened with employee benefits and also billing expenses.

The billing aspect of this program is also very troublesome.  The city will pass the billing duty on to the county so that they can save money to again shore up our budget.  Your point below Mr. Campillo sums up the jeopardy the city is putting on struggling homeowners by farming out its billing responsibility.

The trash proposal should have been put out for bid in a fair and unbiased way to private as well as the city’s Environmental Services Department.   Being a charter city, we are not obliged to use the city’s sponsored service.  That also is an important point that the city has seemed to ignore.  But we are an informed public that knows this is written in the City Charter which is our city’s constitution.

The city’s credibility has been shattered by these continued ‘alternate facts’ or ‘falsehoods’.   So, I hope that Jen Campbell, Joe La Cava and Henry Ford will vote the program down during the second reading on June 9th because they have displayed reasonable minds in the past.

With $4.5million dollars wasted so far on the outside analyst (which should have been done in-house), in addition to unknow costs for administrative time , let’s stop digging a deeper hole and toss this boondoggle where it belongs, in the trash.

Very Sincerely,Lisa Mortensen