Outrage of the day: City finds new ways to charge you for trash

This is warning to every Angelenos to open anything -- no matter -- how dull that the bureaucracy of sanitation sends to your house, and then scrutinize your bi-monthly DWP bill.

Why? Because otherwise you might find you are paying even more than $36-a-month trash pickup fee that begins next month to pay for cops, raises and anything else City Hall needs money for. You might find a surcharge for having extra capacity bins, even if you don't have them.

Today the city announced it would start charging people with more than one bin.

Sanitation officials estimate that 77,000 Angelenos have extra bins that the city has neglected to charge for, resulting in an annual loss of $8.5 million. Notices were sent out to those residents, and about 1,000 chose to return their bins.

Residents who retained their bins should expect to pay $5 a month for the black and brown units, which hold garbage and horse manure, and $2.50 a month for the green bins that hold yard waste.

That sounds reasonable except that my personal experience is that the city doesn't have good records of who has more bins than they should. Here's my story:Earlier this summer I got a note from the B of S department saying that i would have to start paying this surcharge, even though I only had the normal amount of bins -- one blue, one green, one dark brown. Their records said I had two green bins, which I don't.

This was puzzling to me until I recalled a time several years ago when the city was doing bin-replacement detail. (I ever wrote a column about it.) The way it worked is that bins out on a certain trash day would be emptied by one team, followed by another team that would replace the bin with a new one, whether it needed replacing or not.

On the day the green bins were scheduled to be replaced, I didn't have any yard waste. I didn't take it out. I didn't get a new bin; the old one is still fine so I didn't call anyone. And the city inaccurately recorded that it gave me a new one, but didn't take the old one away. Bingo. Surcharge for me.

The customer service person said she would flag my account, but I'm willing to bet I still get hit with the charge come September. If you had missed any bin replacement, you should assume the city will charge you too. I know it's just a little amount, but its the principal. Banks, credit card companies, cell phone service providers, airlines, just about everyone is killing us with fees. There's got to be a line somewhere.