San Diego City Council candidates have another bone to pick with City Hall.
Last week, thousands of residents received overcharges and undercharges for the city’s trash fee on their property tax bill. The city sent bad billing information for roughly 87,700 customers to the county tax collector’s office, as NBC San Diego first reported. A data transfer mistake led to the error.
Ahead of the November election, I asked City Council candidates to weigh in on the mistake. Most said they weren’t surprised and that this was just another example of operational failures at City Hall. They say the city needs a chief operating officer, despite the mayor taking reins of the role last year.
The city’s trash fee blunder hit District 2, which runs from Pt. Loma to Clairemont, the city’s coastal neighborhoods hardest, with roughly 18,400 households charged inaccurate fees.
City Council District 2 candidate and former Republican Richard Bailey said the mistake “is simply the latest output” of a culture of incompetence at City Hall. He said voters have an opportunity to change that in November.
Bailey said when a large dataset is sent from one system to another (in this case data from Salesforce, a business platform, to a TXT file) you’d want to pull a random sample of records and compare them against the source. That way you can make sure the totals match.
He said because of the mistake he would push for a new rule on the City Council.
“On the Council, I’d push for a simple rule: no billing data goes to the County without a documented sample check and a reconciliation of totals, signed off by a named person,” he said over text.
Deputy city attorney and Democrat Nicole Crosby is also running for the District 2 Council seat. She said the mistake is inexcusable and a lot of residents in their district, who are seniors, may not understand what’s happening.
“Being able to reach all of those individuals and then having to apologize again for what’s been happening at City Hall is inexcusable,” she said.
In 2004, voters approved a change in the city’s governance structure from a City Council-Manager form to a strong mayor form of government. Under this system, the mayor is the city’s chief executive officer and all major city departments report to him directly.
Until now, the mayor has historically had a chief operating officer that runs the city’s day-to-day operations. But last year, Gloria fired the COO and decided to take on the role himself. Since then, many have called for him to bring back a COO.
Crosby said she’s disappointed in Gloria’s failure to get the basics right, and thinks people need to work together and leave their ego at the door.
“We need to have a COO [chief operating officer] at the city who can run the operations, who can ensure communication across departments, and up and down through the chain of command who are doing the everyday work to make San Diegans have a great city,” she said.
Incumbent and District 4 Councilmember Henry Foster has been a vocal opponent of the city’s trash fee.
He couldn’t be reached for comment, but his staff directed me to his official statement. He also suggested Gloria should consider stepping down.
“We continue to see these significant mistakes in operations, and ultimately, this speaks to the Mayor’s competence as the Chief Operating Officer,” he wrote on Instagram.
Incumbent Kent Lee is running in the District 6 Council race and has also repeatedly asked the mayor to restore the chief operating officer.
District 8 candidate Antonio Martinez also supports this move.
But he said city officials need to dig into how the trash fee error happened and how they are going to fix it. Martinez said he foresees a potential class action lawsuit because of the error.
“I can tell you this is a bigger thing that the city of San Diego doesn’t even know how big it’s going to get,” he said in an interview with Voice. “I could tell you even reimbursing people is not going to be enough.”
Martinez said the mayor needs to hire more independent city employees that are independent of the mayor and councilmembers. He said part of the challenge with staff is that they feel accountable to the mayor and City Council.
“The truth is they need to be independent of that,they need to be accountable to the taxpayer,” said Martinez.
Martinez’ opponent Gerardo Ramirez said the city auditor should review what happened and report it back publicly to the Council to prevent the mistake being made again. Like other Council candidates, he said the lack of a chief operating officer has a negative impact on the city’s operations.
Ramirez said the trash fee has already had a rough start, and the latest mistake just makes public distrust worse.
“The city needed to, in my opinion, earn back people’s trust, and instead it sent out tens and thousands of wrong bills. That makes every future conversation about city fees harder,” he said.
District 4 candidate Martha Abraham and District 6 candidate Mark Powell did not respond to a request for comment.
