How the Trash Screw-Up Happened and Why It’s Not Going Away

It was the simplest of mistakes. 

The city sent bad billing information on roughly 87,700 customers to the county tax collector’s office. An employee transferring the data from Salesforce into a TXT file made an error, the Politics Report has learned. 

City staff say that about 50.2 percent of people were overbilled and 49.8 percent of people were underbilled. Mayor Todd Gloria insisted that a fix was in motion and the county was cooperating to quickly send out new property tax bills.

But there’s been a snag: They can send new property tax bills to the people who were overcharged. They can’t send new ones to the people undercharged. The city plans to send supplementary bills to each of them. This will all add time and hassle and major costs to resolving the problem.

What happened: Getting the data from Salesforce to a TXT file, at least in theory, should have been as easy as copy and paste or exporting a file into a different format. But a column in the data was not locked and the trash fee amounts got assigned to the wrong rows of households. 

The error itself and the fallout this week at a City Council meeting may not even be the all of it. The whole trash fee controversy, dead as it should be, is ready to keep walking. The city — already in the throes of a budget crisis — will have to keep throwing time and money at this problem. 

The county treasurer tax collector confirmed that state law prohibits the county from sending corrected bills to those who were undercharged. It can only send out corrected information for the half of customers that were overcharged.

That means it will be up to the city to collect from the people who were undercharged. The city’s FAQ page, which was updated Friday afternoon, now says about people who were undercharged: “These customers should pay the amount currently included on their county tax statement, and plan to pay a supplemental bill from the city for the difference.” 

This must be an even a deeper sting.

City leaders decided to bill for the trash fee through county property tax bills. That would spare them from having to set up their own billing system. It was part of the big controversy of the new fee and why some councilmembers said they were hesitant or outright unwilling to support it. It was supposed to save the city a ton of money. 

When the city faced a lawsuit and movement to repeal the fee, taking it out of property tax bills was a major point in the first settlement offer. The City Council rejected that — it was important to the city to leave it in property tax bills. A second settlement push conceded that point.

Now, after all that, they are going to have to figure out how to bill approximately 40,000 households.

Problem 1: They are going to be coming up several million dollars short on revenue because of the underbilling. It’s unclear exactly how much. 

Problem 2: It’s going to cost time, money and headache to bill 40-odd thousand people for several million dollars. We do not know how much.

Problem 3: City and county staff are meeting next week to plan and the county plans to recoup its costs to resend bills. Again, it’s unclear how much.

Exactly what the city plans to send the undercharged is unclear. Another city webpage says this: “The city will provide follow-up communication with information about how to pay the difference.”

The bigger picture: Public trust is at an all-time low and people are worried it may get worse. The paid parking debacle in Balboa Park and a recent controversy over budget-motivated bathroom closures have left the city reeling. Now it is bracing for a storm season that could be disastrous. Gloria has more than two years remaining as mayor and he has a lot on his plate. 

Last year, after Gloria fired the city’s chief operating officer, he took over the job. He did this, he said, because it saves the city money and it was what voters intended when they switched to a strong mayor form of government. There was never an official chief operating officer inserted in the City Charter, though every mayor over the last 20 years has appointed one.  

The costs of this debacle, however, could dwarf a COO’s salary. The mayor’s office would insist, and it’s true, that there’s no guarantee that a COO would have caught the error. But a top professional manager may put people and systems in place to minimize errors.

The mayor, meanwhile, has a lot going on. He’s also the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors — a role that had him in New York the day before the trash fee story dropped. 

Last thing: Here’s a breakdown of how many home owners were affected by council district. District 2 which runs from Point Loma to Clairemont got it the worst. The Democratic candidate in that district Nicole Crosby has got to be thrilled. 

• Joe LaCava, District 1 – roughly 6,700 households
• Jennifer Campbell, District 2 – roughly 18,400 households
• Stephen Whitburn, District 3 – roughly 10,000 households
• Henry Foster III, District 4 – roughly 13,300 households
• Marni von Wilpert, District 5 – roughly 1,300 households
• Kent Lee, District 6 – roughly 900 households
• Raul Campillo, District 7 – roughly 13,900 households
• Vivian Moreno, District 8 – roughly 9,100 households
• Sean Elo-Rivera, District 9 – roughly 13,900 households

Mariana Martínez Barba and Scott Lewis contributed reporting to this story.

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