Beach Season Elections

In 1919 the citizens of San Diego, outraged by that fact that their picked-up garbage was being sold to pig farmers, passed a law mandating that trash collection for private residences be funded by the general budget, that no separate fee could be charged for that service. Why selling garbage to pig farmers was objectionable and what separate fees have to do with that is a complete mystery to me, but San Diegans have never been big on being rational about what we do or why we do it.

We have sun, beaches, beautiful girls... Rationality would ruin everything.

Fast forward 90 years to our current budget crisis, and a few City Council members have become outraged that, with the city budget deficit, the city is still offering its citizens, wait for it, “free trash pickup.” They claim that we simply can no longer afford to provide the “luxury of free trash pickup” to a million or so homeowners.

The trucks are owned and maintained by the city. The people who do the work are city employees. The landfills are on city property and are operated by city employees. All of this is paid for in the city budget with money provided by city resident taxes. So how this amounts to “free trash pickup” is apparent only to these few City Council members.

But there I am expecting rational thinking again. Silly me.

There is a reason these City Council members have come up with this concept; not a rational reason, of course, but a reason. I shall attempt to explain. Pay attention because you are not only dealing with California here, but with San Diego, which is an abstruse, Republican subset of California.

California cannot raise taxes without a two-thirds vote of the affected public. The City Council can, however, impose and modify fees for services without a public vote at all, so these City Council members want to impose a trash collection fee rather than trying to obtain a tax increase. Unfortunately, for them, that pesky 1919 city ordinance specifically prohibits that particular fee from being imposed.

It does not, as those members now claim, mandate “free trash collection.”
It does mandate that trash collection be paid for out of city general revenue. These members are applying the “clap harder” principle, whereby if they say something often enough and loudly enough eventually people will come to believe it. Interestingly, it seems to be working because 30% in a recent poll indicated that they believe we should not “continue free trash pickup.”

The poll may have been conducted at Ocean Beach on a sunny day.

Perhaps adjacent to the dead whale. They may have polled the people who were in that immediate vicinity having come there, apparently, in order to complain about the odor.

Or, that 30% may be people who live in apartments and condominiums and have been paying for many years to get their trash picked up because the 1919 law applies only to single family dwellings. If that is the case, then no matter how hard the City Council claps, that 30% is not going to increase.

The City Council knows that citizens of this city will not vote to raise taxes on themselves, and will not vote for a raise in fees on themselves. Nonetheless, these City Council members are operating on the fond hope that the citizens of San Diego will vote to overturn a 90-year-old ordinance that prevents a fee from being imposed when the City Council has said that it is asking for the ordinance to be repealed specifically so that it can impose that fee. Although, given the length of that sentence and the attention span of the average San Diegan, they may be right. The special election is in May, which is beach season.

And, of course, we did elect them, which was not entirely rational.