The Tangled Math of “Fair” Trash Collection

By Marty Graham / May 19, 2025

Remember that Measure B campaign for fairness and free bins?

In the last two weeks, about 47,000 San Diego households received letters kicking them off free city trash service they’d been receiving and leaving them to scramble to find private haulers. Nearly all are in buildings with more than four homes, both apartments and condos. (Existing service for a two cubic yard dumpster for trash only – not including recycling – at a North Park condo building currently runs about $300 a month, or about $38 per unit each month.

Coincidentally, the City Auditor released a report that concludes those private haulers are NOT paying their fair share of landfill costs. While the report said the loss belongs to the city, it’s obvious that taxpayers have been subsidizing trash costs for anyone using a private hauler – and for the more than 47,000 households who got kicked off free service.

A quick comparison of maps for where the booted families live and the vote spread for Measure B paints a striking picture – of voters who thought they were imposing fees on other people who live in single family homes. There was no mention in the campaign of disruptive problems for multifamily buildings, Oops.

But wait, there’s more. The city now says those extra services that we likely will start paying for in July 2025 won’t actually be available until July 2027. But we’ll pay for them for two years in advance. The discounts for low-income households – and that’s at least 30 percent of the homes – won’t be implemented for the first year when everyone will be charged flatly at the full rate.

So that’s two years of paying for services not delivered – and about $600 a year for every household regardless of how much trash it generates, how many people live there, and how hard it is to pay when housing and 3.8% inflation continue to push more people into a fight to pay for basics.

The plan calls for disposing of at least half-million or more black and blue bins. The cost-of-service study counts about a million black and blue bins citywide that may be replaced. Laid end to end, that pile of plastic from a half-million bins would reach from here to San Francisco. A million bins make it a round trip back.

When the city says they will be recycled, what they mean is taxpayers will pay its contracted private recycler – a subsidiary of Waste Management – to take them off our hands. Reports as recent as November 2024 say that only about 10 percent of plastics actually get reused. The rest get sent offshore where the petroleum products are burned.

Then there’s the increased energy consumption and consequent emissions from doubling recycling pickups, the increase in asthma-causing particulate matter, the wear-and-tear on the trucks, and damage to the roads.

Trash fee “fairness” champion Sean Elo -Rivera says this effort is “good for the environment.” since it includes doubling the recycling pickups to gather about the same amount of “recyclables’” as the current biweekly schedule. The plan delights the unions, whose numbers increase with the hiring of around 100 people with city pensions, and their astroturf  “nonprofit” supporters who rely on city and union funding.

But people who care about climate change and wasteful policy – and about the city’s burgeoning pension debt – are less than thrilled. You don’t have to be a single family homeowner or resident to see how counterproductive this all is.

At the time he raged against people exploiting free city services, Elo Rivera was living in a 7-unit condo building that had free city trash service. He demonized single family homeowners and residents, many of whom are renters. And he knew he was lying – he had a weekly reminder when he rolled his bins out in the alley.

So let’s consider the “fairness” he championed. People whose trash service is being subsidized by taxpayers voted that other people should have to pay. And then, putting the Measure B vote maps side by side with the kicked-off city service maps, many of those ‘fairness’ voters are now also facing trash collection costs that, according to the City Auditor, should be much higher. Given the current budget deficit, it probably will be.

It won’t take a campaign paid for by the Municipal Employees Association to raise private hauler customers’ costs. Hopefully, that same fairness of charging twice what was promised to deliver the same service will be shared with the people who voted for fairness.

And those “free” bins? The estimated cost of $10.1 million to replace them during the first year got rolled into the fees.

Marty Graham is an investigator reporter who lives in North Park.