San Diego followed through Tuesday on a controversial plan to pay as much as $4.5 million to determine how much single-family homes in the city should be charged for trash and recycling services.
Many residents and some city leaders have expressed concern that the cost of the study is too high, but the City Council voted 7-1 in favor of paying consultant HDR Engineering that much.
City officials said the contract is unusually expensive because San Diego has been providing trash and recycling for free to single-family homes for decades, so customers have never been asked what they actually want.
“What’s included in this contract is much more than just a normal cost-of-service study,” said Rene Robertson, who oversees city trash and recycling. “This is the first time. This is a historic moment for San Diego.”
San Diego is able to start charging single-family homes for trash and recycling because city voters approved Measure D in November 2022.
But Robertson said the city must be careful to find out what services residents want, figure out the most efficient way to provide them and then determine how much to charge.
The contract includes nearly $1.7 million for more than 7,000 hours of community outreach, which will include meetings in multiple languages and other efforts to gather input.
Councilmember Raul Campillo, who cast the lone “no” vote Tuesday, said he thinks the city is paying too much.
“That’s incredibly high,” he said. “In my opinion, it looks like it’s too much to get a sense of what customers want.”
Robertson said future cost-of-service studies for trash will include much less aggressive outreach, stressing that it’s unusual to be starting out mostly from scratch.
“Stakeholder engagement really is a one-time lift, and we feel it’s really important to do it right and set this process up with a lot of transparency and elevating the community’s voice,” she said.
Robertson said the contract also includes $670,000 to study whether the city is efficiently collecting trash and recycling now, and how it could improve. “The last time we had a look at how efficient we’re being was over 10 years ago, so we felt it was really important to have an outside entity look at that,” she said.
The goal is making improvements, reducing how often trash trucks miss certain houses and making sure the city is good stewards of every dollar collected, she said.
Councilmember Marni von Wilpert thinks the money will be well-spent. “This is actually going to help make sure our taxpayer dollars are used wisely,” she said.
The city expects to collect about $80 million in new annual revenue once nearly 300,000 single-family home customers start paying monthly trash and recycling fees in summer 2026.
Other issues for the consultant to consider are whether the city should add new services, such as regular pickups for bulky trash and hazardous waste, or shift recycling pickups from every two weeks to every week.
A potentially larger challenge will be designing a “pay-as-you-throw” program that would mean lower bills for people who produce less trash and higher bills for those who produce the most trash. City officials say such a program will help achieve San Diego’s goal of net-zero waste by 2035.
Robertson also noted that the contract is only for $3.6 million in services. About $900,000 more is included to defend the city from potential lawsuits challenging its rates, but she said that money won’t be spent if none are filed.
Any such lawsuits are expected to be based on California’s Proposition 218, which bars government agencies from charging more for a service than it costs to provide.
