Thousands of San Diego property owners are opening their tax bills to find trash collection charges that are wildly, sometimes triple, what they should be. City officials say the errors stem from a technical glitch in the data transmitted to the county tax collector, and they are now racing to figure out how many people were hit before the November 1 payment deadline.
Normal Heights resident Marty Graham was billed $534 instead of the $311 she actually owes, according to reporting by the San Diego Union-Tribune. In North Park, resident Bob LaRose was charged $1,026 rather than the correct amount of $324, per the same report. The paper also identified a common billing error pattern that charged some customers $1,590 instead of $534 — roughly triple the correct amount.
City officials are still assessing the exact scope of the problem, but the newspaper's reporting cites estimates from Graham and her neighbors suggesting that roughly one-third of the city's trash customers could be affected. San Diego has about 220,000 trash customers total, meaning as many as nearly 75,000 households could see inflated bills if that estimate holds.
Why the Fee Even Ended Up on Tax Bills
The overcharges trace back to a structural choice the city made when it first rolled out trash fees. San Diego uses property tax bills to collect its trash service fees, a method officials chose specifically to avoid spending millions of dollars standing up a dedicated city trash billing department, the Union-Tribune reports. The fee itself dates to 2025, made possible after a 2022 ballot measure — Measure B — allowed the city to begin charging for trash pickup for the first time in over a century.
That history matters because of who is and is not covered. Single-family homes are eligible for city trash service, as are multifamily properties with four units or fewer; everyone else in the city has to hire private haulers. The system traces back to a 1986 voter amendment that barred the city from charging fees to properties receiving city trash pickup, according to Ballotpedia — a policy that left renters and condo owners paying private haulers while single-family homeowners got pickup funded by general tax dollars. Measure B itself passed by a razor-thin margin, 50.41% to 49.59%, separated by fewer than 3,450 votes out of 400,000 cast, according to Waste Dive.
How the Billing Went Wrong This Time
City officials have accepted responsibility for the error, saying in a prepared statement that it happened during transmission of the billing file to the county. The city is asking customers not to file formal billing disputes and says it will contact impacted customers directly and work with the county to correct the mistake, according to the Union-Tribune's reporting.
The complication is timing. Property taxes are due November 1 and become delinquent December 10, leaving a narrow window for the county's online billing portal — which currently reflects the incorrect, inflated amounts for affected customers — to be corrected. City officials are urging customers to check their amounts on wasteportal.sandiego.gov and compare them against what appears on sdttc.com. Customers whose figures don't match between those two systems don't need to take any action; the city says it will handle those refunds directly, since the city's own residential waste collection services portal contains the accurate account information. Only about half of the city's 220,000 trash customers have created accounts on that portal so far.
The stakes are higher for anyone whose mortgage is on an impound account, since lenders typically divide the annual property tax bill into 12 equal installments folded into the monthly mortgage payment. Graham told the paper that mortgage companies may require full payment of an incorrect tax bill regardless of the underlying error, which could leave affected homeowners fronting inflated sums while they wait for a refund. LaRose, for his part, described the entire trash-fee saga to the paper as a crazy one.
A Separate Fight Over Future Rates
The billing glitch has no connection to a separate settlement the city reached in May to lower trash fees, according to the Union-Tribune. That deal, covering fiscal years 2028 and 2029, dropped the scheduled rate for standard 95-gallon bins to $38.75 a month starting July 1, 2027, down from the $55 rate the city had originally adopted, according to lajolla.ca. The city negotiated the lower rate in exchange for homeowners dropping a lawsuit alleging Proposition 218 violations and abandoning a ballot campaign to repeal the fee outright.
As part of the same deal, the City Council agreed to eliminate paid parking kiosks at Balboa Park by January 1, 2027, giving up projected park-maintenance revenue from the program introduced earlier in 2026.
Opposition to the fee had been building since it launched. During the Proposition 218 protest period in June 2025, opponents submitted written protests, but the effort did not block adoption. The baseline monthly rates that took effect that July were $43.60 for standard 95-gallon bins, $38.94 for 65-gallon bins, and $32.82 for 35-gallon bins, according to city fee schedules.
San Diego's fee-free era traces back to a 1919 ordinance that was originally supposed to fund trash pickup by selling organic waste to pig farms and creating a dedicated tax; when the pig-farm revenue fell short and the tax never materialized, General Fund financing began in 1970, according to historical records from CleanGreenSD.org. City cost studies published in June 2025 projected annual solid waste collection costs of $112.6 million for fiscal year 2025 and $139.4 million for fiscal year 2026. Fee revenue would go into a dedicated Solid Waste Management Fund.
The billing fee has been just one front in a broader operational overhaul of the city's waste system.
