The San Diego City Council will vote Monday to partially reduce trash fees for single-family homes and roll back entirely paid parking in Balboa Park.
The decisions might be a foregone conclusion, with the council agreeing on paper to take those actions last month in order to prevent potentially losing all the revenue in lengthy lawsuits.
However, the items will still be discussed in a public forum for the first time and are subject to the council's vote.
The decision behind closed doors on May 20 was a win for opponents of the hotly debated fees, but also represented a compromise by requiring a collection of homeowners suing the city over the trash fees to drop efforts to repeal the fees via ballot measure this fall.
However, it also means the city must find the lost revenue — or slash existing services — from somewhere else, as a tense budget process for the 2026-27 fiscal year enters its final weeks.
"The settlement is a compromise that resolves multiple existing threats that could have forced more than $150 million in additional cuts," Mayor Todd Gloria said. "To reach this agreement, both sides had to make concessions.
"It is not perfect or ideal, but my responsibility is to protect what matters most for San Diegans, and on the whole, this agreement does that by protecting San Diegans from far deeper cuts to essential services like police, fire protection, libraries, and parks."
The homeowners sued the city following the passage of Measure B, which ended more than 100 years of free trash pickup services for single-family homes. The plaintiffs alleged the fees violate Proposition 218, an initiative approved by California voters in 1996 that holds utility fees cannot exceed the costs of providing those services.
Former San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre, one of the attorneys representing the homeowners, said that while voters approved a monthly fee of between $23 and $29, the City Council approved imposing a nearly $44 monthly fee.
"This is draining money from people's homes and if they are not able to pay, they are terrified that they will be foreclosed on," Aguirre told Superior Court Judge Euketa Oliver earlier this month. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the trial over the trash fees was recessed on Wednesday and will likely be dismissed this week.
If passed Monday — and again at a second reading in several weeks — the fees will not be reduced to $29 per month, but they will be reduced to $38.75 starting next year — a number adjusted for inflation from the initial proposal in 2021.
In June 2025, the City Council passed the solid-waste fee, breaking a 106-year-old precedent of the city not charging single-family homeowners a fee for trash pickup. The Lincoln Club Business League began collecting signatures this winter to place the issue on the ballot.
The People's Ordinance, as the free trash pickup was nicknamed, had been criticized for years by activists for being inequitable because although every household pays property tax either directly or through rent, only single- family households received trash pickup at no additional charge. In 2009, a San Diego County grand jury concluded that the ordinance had "outlived its usefulness in a 21st century society."
