I\u2019ve written about a wide variety of subjects lately and I wanted to follow-up on some of them.<\/p>\n
Overcharging on trash fees<\/p>\n
I swore I wasn\u2019t going to write about the trash fee debacle again but here we go. It was recently discovered that due to a technical glitch in the data that the city (of San Diego) gave to the county tax collector, the city overcharged many thousands of residents as much as $1,000 more on their property tax bills than they owe for the new trash fees. As it turns out, we are one of them. Others are being charged triple what they owe. Billing for trash fees on property taxes was one of the city\u2019s worst ideas ever (along with the trash fees themselves). Definitely time for a City Manager again.<\/p>\n
U.S. Postal Service<\/p>\n
Back in May, I wrote a column that included the U.S. Postal Service tracking history of a blouse I ordered to be shipped from Los Angeles, a mere 120 miles away. It made nine stops, traveled almost 3,500 miles and enjoyed the scenery as far away as Dallas and Fresno. I commented at the time that I hope it had enjoyed its sojourn and made some new garment friends. This shirt saw more of the north central plains area of Texas and the California central valley than most Americans.<\/p>\n
I really (really) hoped that this was some sort of fluke. But recently a reader sent me the following message along with his USPS tracking saga.<\/p>\n
Dear Inga,<\/p>\n
I recently decided that instead of going to the CVS on Garnet in Pacific Beach, I would pay the $5.49 charge to have my prescription delivered to my home in the promised three days time. I hope that you will be able to access the journey of my prescription through the above website. In short, before reaching me it travelled from San Diego to various CVS and USPS locations in El Centro, Newark (New Jersey) and Springfield, Massachusetts before being delivered eight days later. I could have walked the three miles to the CVS and back in less time (if I could walk) than it took CVS to send my pills 5,000 miles on a cross-country voyage.<\/p>\n
And I thought my blouse\u2019s deluxe sightseeing tour of America was impressive. But New Jersey? Massachusetts? Gah. I fear that neither of these stories are flukes at all. I can only surmise that whomever designed the USPS\u2019 distribution system graduated in the bottom two percent of his computer science class. No surprise that USPS lost $2.5 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 (April\u2013June).<\/p>\n
Cutting bus routes<\/p>\n
A theme that I\u2019ve written about several times is the city government\u2019s increasing willingness to not require parking in new residential or commercial development if it is within a half mile of a \u201ctransit corridor.\u201d In La Jolla\u2019s case, that\u2019s the MTS No. 30 bus. I\u2019m a huge fan of public transportation (we never owned a car in Sweden) but it would really be a challenge for most families to rely solely on our current bus system get themselves to work, school, medical appointments, sports practices, grocery shopping, etc. The buses aren\u2019t reliable enough, and don\u2019t run often enough. So imagine my dismay to open my San Diego Union-Tribune on Sept. 18 and see the front-page story that among the newest proposed budget cuts are canceling one third (33 of 99) of the existing bus routes, and reducing service substantially on many others. News flash, city fathers\/mothers: if you want the citizenry to use public transit, you have to provide it!<\/p>\n
Usurious city fees, parking<\/p>\n
Our city leaders seem to have chosen parking as a way to truly irritate the constituents. Fortunately, the Balboa Park parking fiasco ends in January \u2013 but why not sooner? The \u201cdaylighting law\u201d which went into effect on January 1, 2025 \u2013 no parking within twenty feet or a marked or unmarked crosswalk \u2013 has been a source of tremendous confusion for citizens and a true boom to the city\u2019s coffers. From July 1, 2025 to February, 2026, 12,449 daylighting tickets were issued at $117.50 each. Meanwhile, only 1,000 of the affected 16,000 intersections have actually been marked.<\/p>\n
Usurious City fees, parking again<\/p>\n
Posters on NextDoor have been commenting on a sudden uptick of tickets \u2014 at $88 each \u2014 for inadequate wheel cramping of cars on hills. It\u2019s always been a law that you have to cramp your car\u2019s wheels on a grade of more than three percent. If parking facing downhill, wheels must be turned toward the curb; uphill, facing out. But it\u2019s suddenly being strictly enforced. La Jolla has a lot of hills so we are really low-hanging fruit on this one. And how much is three percent? Has there been an epidemic of runaway cars lately, or more likely, is this one more way to extract money from (and annoy the heck out of) the local citizenry?<\/p>\n
None of the above<\/p>\n
I discovered after a recent column on this subject that I\u2019m not the only person who wishes they could vote for \u201cnone of the above\u201d in the upcoming elections. My Republican husband (I\u2019m a life-long Democrat) and I have never felt so politically aligned.<\/p>\n
And finally \u2026 the beep goes on<\/p>\n
I recently wrote a column about all the things that beep at my house and trying to even figure out what might be beeping at any given time. One of the most annoying beep sounds was smoke alarms whose batteries seem programmed to expire at 2 a.m. emitting a water-drip-torture beep alert for the rest of the night.<\/p>\n
Recently, our next-door neighbor\u2019s hard-wired (not battery-operated) smoke alarm was going off while they weren\u2019t home. It could be heard several houses away, including and especially at ours. We, along with other neighbors, texted and left voicemails alerting them to this. Fortunately, the house did not appear to be on fire which would, of course, have (ultimately) resolved the problem. The husband left work to come home and deal with this and the beeping finally stopped. The wife alerted the neighbors the next day. \u201c[Husband] did everything the internet suggested to get this thing to stop. Finally he smashed it with a hammer.\u201d Now that\u2019s my kind of solution to annoying technology. And it had to have been so satisfying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve written about a wide variety of subjects lately and I wanted to follow-up on some of them.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,930,5184,6804,74,84,76,75],"class_list":["post-494828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-la-jolla","tag-la-jolla-light","tag-la-jolla-light-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}