Trash and illegal dumping in San Jose continue to skyrocket

With trash and illegal dumping skyrocketing in San Jose, San Jose city leaders are calling for more vigorous enforcement as they grapple on how to stop the growing blight.

Last year, the amount of trash and debris collected increased by 33% to 12.6 million pounds despite San Jose spending more resources on beautifying the city.

“The cost alone is significant and is crowding out other priorities in our budget,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said Tuesday. “It also demonstrates that our three E’s (eradication, education and enforcement) approach is not yet as implemented. They might be the right three strategies, but as currently implemented, (they are) not doing enough to get upstream of and really address this issue.”

Over the past two years, San Jose has taken a tougher stance on reducing blight in the city, but the results have been questionable.

On the positive side ,San Jose emphasized cleanups and engaging residents –who provided over 32,000 hours of work last year — and city workers have responded to illegal dumping reports more than half a day quicker than last year,

The city also has organized 152 dumpster days this year, up from 96 last year, contributing to collecting more than 2.9 million pounds of trash.

Yet illegal dumping continues to be a challenge, with 21% more reports last year. In that same period, the city only issued 51 citations, receiving payment from just 38 of those, leaving city leaders and residents frustrated with the lack of enforcement and the message sent to illegal dumpers.

“Each year, the city has been spending millions of dollars of our resident’s money cleaning up growing amounts of trash while not even attempting to hold the dumpers accountable,” Resident Ken Brennan said. “For context, the city has collected on average only $21K per year in fines over the last seven years, not even enough to cover the administrative costs of issuing and collecting these fines. Without consequences, illegal dumping behavior will continue to grow and our ballooning cleanup costs will continue to starve our city of financial resources.”

Deputy City Manager Angel Rios noted that new eradication and educational efforts began two years ago as the city struggled with how to tackle blight but agreed more enforcement was necessary.

Among the items included in this year’s budget are illegal dumping and graffiti stings, adding cash incentives for tips that lead to citations for illegal dumping and graffiti tagging and installing more cameras and deterrents at hotspots.

“We’ve been leading with eradication because that’s where the pain points have been,” Rios said. “Taking a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kind of approach, we had to meet the problem where it was at, recognizing the true answer is going to be with full-blown education and enforcement … we definitely have to pivot to enforcement.”

While some of the preventative measures the city has implemented, such as installing boulders, bollards, or signage, have stopped illegal dumping at some locations, Olympia Williams, deputy director of the community service division, said that those initiatives have shifted the problems to other places in San Jose rather than residents using free junk pickup services or dumpster days hosted by the city.

Williams also noted that in hotspot areas where the city has proactively monitored for dumping and residents don’t call in reports, some people have gotten used to putting things out on the street, believing that the city will pick them up.

Although San Jose does currently have eight cameras installed to monitor illegal dumping, the cameras move from location to location, making it difficult to assess whether they have had a positive effect in curbing the activity.

The biggest unanswered question, though, is where all the excess trash and debris are coming from.

City officials have opined that hauling services and contractors could be to blame for the spike in illegal dumping.

“If I hire a contractor at my house and they replace the drywall somewhere and they do some work, they leave and the only thing I care about as the person who hires them is that they’ve taken away the materials,” District 4 Councilmember David Cohen said. “I believe a high percentage of what we see dumped is the contractor not wanting to pay to dump their material, so they take it somewhere and they dump it. I remember walking on Coyote Creek and seeing shelves and file boxes from a medical office that clearly had been renovated and all their stuff was dumped there.”

The city has also taken notice of the numerous hauling services on Nextdoor and Craigslist for prices that don’t make financial sense. Testimonials for those services have also noted the prevalence of residents’ belongings ending up around the corner from their properties, prompting Mahan to suggest the city target them as part of sting operations.

“My strongest thesis here, which I put front and center in the budget message, was we’re not doing enough enforcement and there still seems to be a message in our community that if you just drop stuff on the side of the road or tag a freeway sign, nothing is going to happen,” Mahan said.