Fines, subsidies and recycled bins: How San Diego’s once-chaotic switch to paid trash pickup is going

San Diego met a key deadline in its chaotic revamp of its trash service last week when the share of former city customers searching for new private service fell below 20% for the first time.

Meeting that goal by the city’s self-imposed Dec. 15 deadline prompted officials to delay plans to start sending warning letters about potential fines to the remaining 3,700 properties that still must make that transition.

Some new problems have emerged with landlords at small complexes not ordering enough new gray cans to adequately service their residents. But officials said those instances have been rare and isolated.

City officials have also revised downward — from $3 million to somewhere between $2 million and $2.5 million — how much they expect to spend servicing former city customers who have been slow to transition.

Nearly 20,000 city customers were declared ineligible for city trash service when the city shifted to charging customers for it. Only single-family homes and complexes with fewer than five units are eligible.

Jeremy Bauer, assistant director of the city’s Environmental Services Department, said Thursday that the recent acceleration in transitions has helped reduce how much the city will end up spending.

Officials are also finalizing details of a subsidy program for low-income residents that will see some bills get immediately reduced, with the county assessor sending out revised property tax bills.

Meanwhile, city cre...