It’s Time to Trash San Diego’s People’s Ordinance
Why, oh why, are most of San Diego’s single family home owners getting free trash pick up service, while the rest of us have to pay?
It’s been that way for more than a century, America’s finest city’s cycle of dumb-ass governance a century ago fixed a problem by creating another. It’s almost as if former Mayor Kevin Faulconer traveled back in time.
Back in 1919, angry citizens demanded that something be done about a private company getting paid twice for America’s Finest Garbage. It seems as though the city was being charged for trash pick up which was then sold to hog farmers at a tidy profit.
By an 85% to 15% margin, voters approved The People Ordinance, which required the city to collect garbage from homes. While the measure allowed the local government to charge for the service, nobody ever bothered to figure out a fee system.
In 1981 and 1986, voters agreed that there could be fees for industrial and commercial waste, along with charges for newly built multi-family homes (condos and apartments). The practice of free trash pick up for single family homes was written into law.
Although multiple grand juries have pointed out the problematic nature of this arrangement, namely that it’s inequitable and deprives the city of needed revenue, The People Ordinance is often considered to be the Third Rail of San Diego politics.
After all, making people pay a fair share is a TAX. And, as we’ve all been told many times, taxes will ruin the economy by stopping trickle down. Or something like that.
Back in the day, then-City Councilman Carl DeMaio argued against the concept of a fee for the single family homeowners by saying the city needed to screw its workers out of their pensions (and jobs by privatizing) to balance its budget.
From a March, 2011 Los Angeles Times article:
According to City Hall figures, 60% of San Diego residents enjoy the free service, while 40% must pay private haulers.
Officials have long worried that someone might sue over the People’s Ordinance, alleging unequal treatment: Apartment residents in blue-collar areas like Encanto and Paradise Hills get a garbage bill, while affluent homeowners in La Jolla and Point Loma do not.
“I’m just wondering if we’re setting ourselves up to lawsuits,” Councilwoman Lorie Zapf said during the recent committee discussion.
The issue is set to come back to the Natural Resources and Culture Committee in late April. “It will be trash day,” said committee Chairman and Councilman David Alvarez.
Fast forward by a decade and Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who chairs the council’s environment committee, told a Voice of San Diego member event about plans to revive the discussion about trash fees, and would consider a ballot measure to fix the problem.
“We want to talk about this later this year and I’m serious, this needs to go,” said Elo-Rivera, who represents communities including City Heights and Talmadge. “We’re gonna to try to make that happen.”
A memo written last year by the city’s independent budget analyst noted that providing trash collection to single-family homes currently costs the city $36.3 million a year. Efforts to reduce methane gas coming out of landfills mean that price is going up.
SB 1383, which goes into effect next January, will mandate recycling of yard trimmings, food scraps and other organic waste.
From the Union-Tribune:
The city must buy enough green carts so that all 290,000 single-family home customers have one and it must extend green recycling service to the 89,000 customers who currently have none.
The state law also requires cities to collect green recycling once a week, forcing San Diego to double its existing recycling service, which is once every two weeks.
“We’re going to need more trucks, more containers, more drivers,” said Ken Prue, the city’s recycling program manager. “We’re in a planning phase now to identify all of our needs and necessary funding.”
Prue said the city, which now spends about $34 million a year on trash service, will have to spend millions more. But he declined to provide a more specific estimate.
There are two ways to look at our trash problem.
The first is that “free” really isn’t free. San Diego homeowners on the trash for nuttin’ train need to suck it up and pay. But…
The companies creating our excess trash in the name of marketing or convenience don’t deserve a free ride, either. The petroleum industry is spending millions of dollars to convince voters that their plastics are actually good for you.
From the New Republic:
There are a couple ways fossil fuels can become plastic. Crude oil can be converted into naphtha, and gas converted into ethane, which are processed at sprawling industrial compounds into ethylene and plastic resins, then used to create consumer goods like grocery bags and single-use water bottles. The International Energy Agency has found that petrochemicals accounted for 14 percent of world oil demand in 2017. Prior to Covid-19, the agency projected that plastics alone—which account for about two-thirds of the petrochemicals industry—would make up 45 percent of the growth in oil demand in the coming decades. BP’s widely cited annual energy outlook was even more bullish, expecting plastics to account for a whopping 95 percent of net oil demand growth through 2040.
The world has a trash problem. Garbage overwhelming our landfills and floating in our oceans threatens our health and is contributing to climate change.
Here’s how much individuals are contributing, according to The Statesman:
The average American generates 4.4 pounds of trash each day, which doesn’t actually sound like a lot. But over the course of a year that sums to more than 1,600 pounds of garbage that, if measured in cubic feet, would be as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And that’s just you! The average American family of four produces more than 6,300 pounds of garbage, roughly the weight of an Asian elephant (or the punchline of a killer “Yo’ Mama” joke). All Americans combined generate 254 million tons of garbage annually, enough trash to stretch to the moon and back 25 times!
What we don’t need to hear more of is the oft-repeated rationale holding that individuals solely responsible for reducing consumption is a solution. Being mindful while our recycled plastic is dumped in Africa (because China won’t take it any more) means the companies producing these products are avoiding the costs of their actions.
Analysts expect plastic production to triple by 2050 and for all the talk about recycling, the reality is that such efforts have been created by the petrochemical industry to make consumers feel better about using their products.
As an NPR investigation from last fall found, the industry has always known that what goes into our blue trash bins can’t be profitably reused.
.The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
Ain’t nothing for free. And it’s about time we started acknowledging that fact.
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It’s Bleach Day!
Via Daily Kos:
If you felt an inexplicable urge to start the day with a Clorox cocktail, that might be because this is Bleach Day. That’s not a celebration of particularly white clothes or singed nose hairs. This is the first anniversary of the day that Donald Trump suggested Americans fight COVID-19 by taking disinfectant and using it “by injection inside” or through a “cleaning” that “gets in the lungs.” In the same press conference, Trump also pondered whether it would be possible to get sunshine inside the body.
While this anniversary might first remind us why the phrase “Let’s party like it’s 2020!” will never catch on, Dan Froomkin at Presswatchers also wants you to remember that, as Trump suggested that the cure to coronavirus lay in disinfectant injections, the reaction of the press was to bend over double in an attempt to make what Trump said seem like a reasonable opinion. There are, apparently, two sides to every issue, including whether it’s dangerous to give people a syringe full of bleach. In the days that followed, accidental poisonings went up, with April 2020 ending with a record number of people who had actually ingested bleach. There is, sadly enough, no data on whether they were cured of COVID-19.
One year ago…
https://twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1253474772702429189?s=20
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Lead image credit Wichan Charoenkiatpakul / Bankok Post