‘Our worst fear about the city trash fee being placed on the tax bill came true this week.’

San Diego Error Causes Tax Bills to Overcharge Thousands

By Marty Graham / Special to the OB Rag

Our worst fear about the city trash fee being placed on the tax bill came true this week.

The city bungled the numbers provided to the county, which then billed the mostly higher fees (though a small number were lower) on the county property tax bill – and my mortgage company got the numbers.

Councilmembers Joe LaCava and Sean Elo Rivera fought the public and insisted on putting this service fee on the tax bill issued by the county tax collector – while saying it’s not a tax – at the June 24th, 2025, city council meeting. The council voted 7-2 in favor with only council members Henry Foster and Raul Campillo voting no to tax roll billing.

Those councilmembers approved this mess – pushed by LaCava and Elo Rivera, despite 46,000 protest votes and dozens of written and spoken comments. Tax roll billing would save money, they said, agreeing to pay the county and setting us up for unpaid tax liens if we don’t pay in full.

So we have this error in front of us now. We knew this would happen, we just didn’t think it would be as widespread – with current estimates of 87,000 wrong bills.

I believe the overbilling was a mistake – not malicious. Moving data from one system to another requires extra effort to validate the data, to make sure that it is accurate and looks the same in the arrival system as it did when it left the departure system. I strongly suspect that’s where the error happened – that no one validated it.

And it’s worth pointing out that the city got lucky that we found it early – before the paper bills went out and while there’s a chance to correct it. Too bad it took citizens to find it first, rather than city staff; and that the county also identified it before the city did.

But for most of us, it was our worst fear manifested and an error that can be repeated coming year after coming year. Many of us already have a credit coming from last year’s overbilling!

My choices, now that the mortgage company has the wrong, high fee, is to either pay too much again or get hit with a lien, knowing the lien holder or my mortgage company can force the sale of my home.

I learned about this fiasco the way many did, a neighbor posting on NextDoor (thank you Rick K.).

The city trash portal says I owe pennies shy of $312, while my 2027 tax bill says $535. The city’s portal numbers look correct. But they didn’t make it to my tax bill. My data buddy and I started looking up tax bills for our neighbors – whose trash cans we can see and calculate their fees – and comparing them to the tax bills. We can’t see the city trash portal numbers. When we found alarmingly high fees, we sampled about 100 tax bills and found even scarier number. (Remember that billing by address is for trash service only at the address, and can vary by the size and number of gray bins.)

That $223 error on my bill pales next to the higher than $1,000 overbillings on several neighbors’ and friends’ bills.

At first, after increasingly long waits on hold, city staff directed people to file a claim for a refund on the Department of Environmental Services site and wait 10 days for a response. That advice changed by Tuesday to Never mind. We’ll find you.

I’m sure that will go smoothly.