How does the protest vote work for San Diego's proposed trash fee?

Yahoo

24-04-2025

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — This week, the city of San Diego began sending out protest vote mailers to the more than 200,000 single-family homeowners who could potentially begin paying a new fee for trash collection.
The vote is the last step in the process for the city before it can implement the proposed charge under California state law regulating how municipalities are able to impose fees on residents related to their property.
Could the city of San Diego lower its new trash collection fee even more?
Here's what homeowners should know about the vote is and how it works.
A protest vote, or a 'majority protest,' is a sort of referendum giving residents who oppose a new fee related to services for their property — in this case, trash collection — an opportunity to stop it from going into effect.
Under state law, if more than 50% of all property owners affected by a new charge present written opposition to a new fee, the municipality seeking to impose it would be barred from doing so.
In California, the bar for local governments to increase or add new fees on residents' properties is quite high to clear. That's because of a proposition passed by voters back in the 1970s, Proposition 13, that set off a series of reforms to limit how municipalities can levy taxes.
Prop 13 specifically targeted property taxes, capping how much cities could charge and when they could determine new tax rates for a given property. This, in effect, cut in half the revenue cities were bringing in from these taxes, forcing them to look at other sources to fund services.
By the 1990s, many cities turned to benefit-based assessment fees, as well other charges not subject to Prop 13's restrictions, as a way to close the gap. That practice inspired another measure, Proposition 218, to further limit how cities could raise revenue from taxes.
One of the many changes Prop 218 made was to impose a new public notice requirements and create a mechanism for those affected by any proposed fees to halt their implementation: the protest vote, officially called a 'majority protest.'
The protest vote part of a public hearing required before a fee is approved and goes into effect. A hearing notice and the protest ballot are required to be sent out a minimum of 45 days before the meeting to all property owners that would be impacted by the new charge.
Before the hearing, property owners opposed to the fee who would like to participate must full out the ballot with their name, address or parcel number, and signature to submit it for their protest to be counted.
The notice and ballot sent out to more than 230,000 homeowners in the city that would be impacted by the proposed waste collection fee can be found here.
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Property owners have until the end of the June 9 hearing to turn in the ballot to the San Diego City Clerk's office. This can be done either by dropping it off in person or by sending it via mail. Those sent by mail must be received prior to the hearing.
The public will also have the option to give oral comment on the fee at the 2 p.m. hearing, but it will not count towards the Prop 218 vote.
Once all the ballots have been collected, the city clerk will have several weeks to count them, weighing the total against the number of homeowners. If it is determined there is a majority against the fee when all have been tabulated, the fee effectively dies.
According to the city, the council will consider the protests — and whether to allow the fee to be collected using the county tax roll — at a final hearing on June 24.
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