{"id":45970,"date":"2025-07-07T12:35:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T12:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/45970\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T12:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T12:35:08","slug":"unfairness-of-citys-previous-trash-fee-policy-is-plain-san-diego-union-tribune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/45970\/","title":{"rendered":"Unfairness of city\u2019s previous trash-fee policy is plain \u2013 San Diego Union-Tribune"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Re \u201cProperty owners in San Diego have never gotten free trash service\u201d (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sandiegouniontribune.com\/2025\/06\/26\/property-owners-in-san-diego-have-never-gotten-free-trash-service\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">June 26<\/a>): In Lisa Mortensen\u2019s letter, she claims that city-provided \u201cfree\u201d trash service is a myth. She is right, but only in a limited sense. Government services are never \u201cfree.\u201d We all pay for them through taxes.<\/p>\n<p>The unfairness is due to the fact that residents of multiple-unit dwellings must pay for trash collection twice, once through taxes and again to a private trash collector.<\/p>\n<p>She then asks if it would be \u201cterrible to not have basic trash collection as a city service.\u201d No, it wouldn\u2019t be terrible. In fact, it would be an improvement. Everybody would have to pay private trash collectors, not just those in multiple-unit dwellings. That would be much fairer. It would probably also be more efficient.<\/p>\n<p>Trash collection from parks and other public places is indeed a \u201ccommunity benefit,\u201d but it is unclear why trash collection from some private properties is a community benefit, but from others it is not.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Philip J. Erdelsky, San Carlos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Re \u201cProperty owners in San Diego have never gotten free trash service\u201d (June 26): In Lisa Mortensen\u2019s letter,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":45971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,7281,1269,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-45970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-letters-to-the-editor","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-sandiego","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114811984455379955","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}