San Diego’s chaotic shift in city trash service has begun to stabilize, with more customers signing up for new bins and more of the roughly 19,000 property owners who lost city service managing to strike deals with private haulers.
But many thousands of customers remain in flux, and the city faces millions in financial losses from the earlier turbulence and because a greater number of people than expected are choosing discounted service.
The city began the monthslong process of delivering new trash and recycling bins this week, just as many city trash customers got property tax bills showing their first-ever trash charge of $261.60 for six months.
City officials say they’re also close to finalizing a subsidy program that will give discounts of at least 50% to roughly 8,000 property owners who meet income-eligibility criteria.
Despite significant recent progress, 5,259 of the 19,282 property owners who lost city service — more than a quarter — have not yet secured new service from one of the city’s contracted private haulers.
City officials say $200 fines could soon be levied against those properties in an effort to spur them to make deals. Warning letters will be sent out next week giving them 30 days to make a deal.
A second letter will then be sent, and fines will be levied 14 days after that if the property owners haven’t submitted proof of new service. Property owners could be subject to additional fines every two weeks.
But Jeremy Bauer, assistant director of the city’s Environmental Services Department, said city officials are hopeful that the number of fines issued will be minimal.
Since the city incentivized the private haulers to offer better deals by softening some recycling requirements, the pace of customers securing new service has accelerated, Bauer said.
The number of customers with new service is now about 73%, well above the city’s goal of 60% by Oct. 31 and ahead of pace for a second city goal of 80% by Dec. 15.
Bauer also said he thinks the number of property owners who haven’t yet secured service is lower than the official number of 5,259, suggesting some have secured service but haven’t yet submitted proof.
The progress comes after months of chaos when property owners and homeowners associations were either getting offered rates far higher than expected or getting rejected outright by haulers who said they lacked enough trucks and workers to take on new customers.
Property owners have been trying to get discounts with tactics like switching from individual cans to dumpsters, making changes to their organic recycling or teaming with nearby properties to lure haulers with better economies of scale.
But things changed in mid-September, when Mayor Todd Gloria signed a rule change allowing haulers to avoid long-standing penalties for low recycling rates if they simply do more to encourage customers to recycle with education and outreach efforts.
Jim Madaffer, executive director of the San Diego County Disposal Association, said the rule change made a big difference. He called the recent jump in the number of people securing contracts evidence of a great partnership between the city and its haulers.
“They’ve really bent over backwards to be as accommodating to these customers as possible,” Madaffer said of the haulers.
Bauer thinks one reason there are still 5,000 customers without service is that many may be bargain-hunting. “Some customers may be putting off a decision so they can shop around and see quotes from all of the different haulers so they can make an informed decision,” he said.
The city’s price tag for continuing to serve these customers since they became ineligible for city trash pickup July 1 is expected to reach about $3 million when all is said and done, Bauer said. That number could be reduced somewhat by revenue from citations, he said.
The city is also facing a new financial challenge: About five times as many customers as expected have signed up for the discounted service they can get by agreeing to use 35-gallon trash bins instead of the traditional 95-gallon bins.
Of the 110,400 people who have chosen their bin sizes, about 10% have chosen 35-gallon bins. When city officials predicted that ratio earlier this year, they guessed that about 2% of customers would choose 35-gallon bins.
Monthly fees for customers with 35-gallon bins are $32.82, compared with $43.60 paid by customers with 95-gallon bins.
That means the city will end up with less total revenue than it anticipated when the City Council approved the new trash fees last spring. If city officials had known so many customers would choose 35-gallon bins, the prices for all customers would have been a bit higher.
The city’s goal is for its revenue and its expenses to match — something called cost recovery. Revenue will be less than projected expenses because so many people have chosen discounted service.
Somewhat mitigating the new financial problem is the fact that 12% of customers chose 65-gallon bins, less than the 16% city officials predicted. Monthly charges for those customers are $38.94.
City officials haven’t provided an estimate of how much the unexpected bin choices will cost them.
And the numbers won’t be clear until more people choose their bins. The 110,400 who have chosen bins is less than half the 225,000 customers eligible for city trash service. Despite a Sept. 30 deadline to choose bins, nearly 115,000 haven’t done so.
Bauer said many of them probably want the default size of 95 gallons, so they haven’t submitted a choice. But he said they should still create an account at sandiego.gov/trash, because that lets them sign up for alerts about shredding events, holiday service changes and other key information.
The city delivered more than 9,000 bins this week, but deliveries of trash bins won’t be complete until next spring. Deliveries of blue recycling bins will run through summer.
Meanwhile, officials are close to finalizing a long-awaited subsidy program, with applications likely to be available next month, Bauer said. The city has decided to provide a $261.60 subsidy to about 8,000 customers — half the annual charge of $523.20 for a 95-gallon bin.
“Half of your bill is meaningful assistance,” Bauer added.
Customers who choose 35-gallon or 65-gallon bins and get a subsidy will get a discount of more than 50%. People enrolled in CalWORKs, Medi-Cal or the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program will be eligible.
Also eligible will be people earning less than 60% of the state’s median income — or less than $3,170 per month for a one-person household and $6,096 per month for a four-person household.
In addition, trash customers who are on a payment plan with the county for their property taxes — meaning they have missed at least one payment — will automatically receive a 100% trash subsidy. Bauer said city officials don’t want anyone to lose their home because of a trash bill.
Property owners who believe they have erroneously been charged for trash service can fill out a new protest form on the city’s website, Bauer said.
The city’s current trash predicament traces back to Measure B, a city ballot measure passed in 2022 that ended the decades-long practice of San Diego providing free trash service to single-family homes and many small townhome and apartment complexes.
Afterward, when determining how much to charge city customers, officials discovered they had been providing no-fee service to about 19,000 homes that should not have been eligible. Those former customers must now work with private haulers, which already handle trash pickup for businesses and larger apartment and condo complexes.
In addition, nearly 800 properties that hadn’t been receiving city service for various reasons were determined to be newly eligible and added to the city’s customer rolls.