Some San Diego property owners opened their tax bills to find the city's new solid-waste fee stated incorrectly. City and county officials are now working to correct the affected parcels, but their public notices leave households without several details they need most: how many bills are wrong, which neighborhoods are involved and when replacements will arrive.
Mayor Todd Gloria said Wednesday that he was briefed on the errors a day earlier and directed the Environmental Services Department to identify every affected property, correct the underlying data and provide the county with accurate billing information. City staff committed to send corrected information to the County Treasurer-Tax Collector on Wednesday, according to the mayor's statement.
The county tax office placed its own alert on the Treasurer-Tax Collector website. It says erroneous City of San Diego trash fees are appearing on some tax bills, that the city is correcting affected parcels and that more information and corrected bills will be issued. Neither notice specifies whether the mistakes are overcharges, undercharges or a mixture of both.
That uncertainty lands differently on each block. A homeowner who budgets taxes through an escrow account may see the charge indirectly through a future payment adjustment. Someone paying a tax bill directly sees a total due but no public timetable for a replacement. Renters generally do not receive the secured-property bill, though building costs can still shape household expenses over time. The official notices do not explain how corrections will interact with those different arrangements.
Residents can search the county's 2026-27 secured roll by parcel number or current mailing address, but a searchable amount is not proof that the trash line is accurate. The county has not told affected owners to calculate their own replacement figure, and the city has not published a parcel list. Until officials issue instructions, a homeowner comparing records should use the city and county's official channels rather than assuming a charge is right or wrong from a neighbor's bill.
The mayor also directed Environmental Services to determine what caused the billing problem and install safeguards before the next cycle. That review is important because a property-tax roll moves data across agencies. The city establishes the solid-waste information; the county produces and collects the secured bill. A mistake in classification, address matching or file transfer can become a household obligation once it reaches that document, even when the county did not originate the charge.
The statement does not identify the failed step, and it would be premature to assign one. It also gives no dollar range, correction cost or estimate of staff time. Those omissions prevent the public from judging whether this is a narrow data cleanup or a larger implementation problem. They also make it impossible to say how much money is at issue across all affected properties.
For now, the practical promise is limited but concrete: the city says it will correct the data and the county says corrected bills will follow. The next notice needs to close the gaps around timing, payment instructions and the treatment of any amount already collected. A billing system becomes real at the kitchen table. Owners should not have to guess which total to trust while two public agencies reconcile the file behind it.