{"id":74442,"date":"2025-07-19T04:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T04:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/74442\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T04:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T04:14:09","slug":"city-leaders-trash-deceit-went-beyond-bait-and-switch-on-cost-of-service-san-diego-union-tribune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/74442\/","title":{"rendered":"City leaders\u2019 trash deceit went beyond bait and switch on cost of service \u2013 San Diego Union-Tribune"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question of whether San Diego\u2019s elected leaders engaged in a dishonest bait-and-switch campaign to persuade voters to allow the imposition of separate trash collection fees on 226,000-plus single-family homes in 2022 hangs over City Hall. While Mayor Todd Gloria dismissed<\/a> allegations of subterfuge in a February interview, that\u2019s not how it looks to many San Diegans. They think the city\u2019s wildly inaccurate assertion in the run-up three years ago to the Measure B vote \u2014 that monthly fees would be in the $23 to $29 range, which proved to be a gross underestimate \u2014 was no accident<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But now it\u2019s time to take a much closer look at the idea that the mayor and City Council weren\u2019t the only parties to a deceptive campaign designed to yield millions of dollars in new revenue to a city flailing to balance its budget because of years of refusing to try to contain compensation costs.<\/p>\n

In March, when the mayor\u2019s trash service overhaul was still three months from approval<\/a>, City Attorney Heather Ferbert threw cold water<\/a> on the idea that the city could go another route entirely. Under a 2006 City Charter amendment approved in a landslide<\/a> by voters, the city is explicitly allowed to use a \u201cmanaged competition\u201d process to decide whether to use private providers of many services, with trash collection cited as an example in the ballot argument for the measure. But in a March email to a U-T reporter, Ferbert said Measure B gave voters a choice \u201cbetween engaging in managed competition or using City forces,\u201d and that they chose the latter. On Friday, asked to respond to a U-T commentary<\/a> on the topic by former City Attorney Jan Goldsmith that had been posted online, a Ferbert aide repeated her previous representations.<\/p>\n

But the response ignored Goldsmith\u2019s key point: Of course Measure B\u2019s language doesn\u2019t supersede language in the City Charter, the city\u2019s de facto constitution, which means that of course it didn\u2019t take outsourcing of trash services off the table. Here\u2019s who agrees: Michael Aguirre, another recent former city attorney. In response to an email from an editorial writer, he cited charter language as showing that the city could use an independent contractor for trash services if it followed the rules set up for \u201cmanaged competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s not just that Ferbert is offering a hard-to-follow legal theory that a city law can put limits on the city constitution \u2014 as if a federal law could reshape the U.S. Constitution. She\u2019s also framing Measure B as having offered voters a choice between city-provided service or considering use of a contractor. This framing is not remotely reflected in the coverage of Measure B before its passage, in either the pro or con ballot arguments<\/a>, or in official city documents<\/a>. It is one more subterfuge.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to one of the big reasons that Ferbert \u2014 then chief deputy city attorney \u2014 won in her 2024 run for city attorney. Many local observers believed that her opponent, Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, was first and foremost a political operative \u2014 someone who would quickly abandon what Ferbert called then-City Attorney Mara Elliott\u2019s \u201cindependent, arm\u2019s-length relationship\u201d with other parts of city government.<\/p>\n

Instead, Ferbert did the abandoning \u2014 not just of Elliott\u2019s core philosophy but of the people who voted for her. Great, just great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The question of whether San Diego\u2019s elected leaders engaged in a dishonest bait-and-switch campaign to persuade voters to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":74443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,6083,1269,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-74442","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-editorials","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\/114877960322863700","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74442","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=74442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}