Up to 90,000 San Diego homeowners were hit with bogus trash charges on their property tax bills after city data was mangled in transmission to county officials.
The error has thrown City Hall into open warfare, with Councilmember Henry Foster demanding Mayor Todd Gloria resign over what critics call a catastrophic failure of basic governance. The solid waste fee debacle, which could affect between 80,000 and 90,000 residents, produced wildly inaccurate bills — some homeowners underpaid, while others faced overcharges topping $1,000.
Gloria, a Democrat, traced the problem to a breakdown between city and county systems. The city’s own Environmental Services trash portal contained accurate figures, he said, but those numbers were altered somewhere in the submission process to San Diego County. The county then used the corrupted data to generate property tax bills.
“It’s a matter of the data that was there being changed in the process of being submitted to the county, and this is something that our quality assurance should have caught. It did not catch it, and that’s why we have to correct it quickly,” Gloria said.
The mayor pledged that corrected information would be forwarded to the county and promised affected homeowners would be made whole. He admitted the city had not yet calculated what the cleanup would cost taxpayers.
Foster, who voted against the trash fee when it was adopted, has escalated the confrontation far beyond the billing error itself. He seized on the crisis to challenge Gloria’s fitness for office and the entire structure of city leadership.
“This speaks to the competency of the mayor… There needs to be change at the City of San Diego. That change needs to start at the top. The mayor needs to look himself in the mirror, and if it’s time for him to step down, then he needs to step down,” Foster said.
The councilmember’s attack draws additional force from a recent shakeup in city management. After Gloria fired former Chief Operating Officer Eric Dargan, the mayor absorbed the COO’s responsibilities and took direct control of daily municipal operations. Foster has since threatened to pursue a ballot measure dismantling San Diego’s strong-mayor system if Gloria does not bring in a qualified administrator to replace Dargan.
Foster made clear he views the trash fee fiasco as symptomatic of deeper dysfunction rather than an isolated technical glitch.
“This so-called error. This is unacceptable,” Foster said.
All nine sitting members of the San Diego City Council are registered Democrats, meaning the conflict unfolding is entirely intra-party. The trash fee itself was contentious enough to generate a “no” vote from Foster before this billing disaster gave him ammunition to reopen the fight over city leadership structure.
Gloria has not publicly addressed Foster’s call for his resignation beyond his statements on the data error and correction process. The mayor’s focus has remained on the technical fix — getting accurate figures to the county and determining how to reimburse or bill residents who received incorrect charges.
The property tax bills landed with homeowners already bearing the new solid waste fee, making the erroneous charges a double blow for those hit with overpayments of $1,000 or more. The scale of the mistake — potentially touching nearly every homeowner subject to the fee — has turned what might have been a routine administrative headache into a political explosion with questions about whether San Diego’s current leadership structure can survive.