San Francisco is literally overwhelmed by garbage. A story published today by the San Francisco Chronicle reveals that complaints about illegal dumping on the city’s streets had quadrupled over the past decade.

In 2022, the city received over 200,000 trash dumping complaints — more than four times more than a decade ago. In 2012, the city received about 45,000 complaints…

Some of the increase in 311 complaints may be due to the complaint system being easier to use, said Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon, acknowledging that she didn’t want to
downplay the challenge of illegal dumping across the city. Still, illegal dumping complaints now make up a greater share of all 311 complaints, rising from just over 25% pre-pandemic
to almost 35% after.

“People are trashing our city,” she said. “How do we get away from that?”

The garbage service in SF is handled by a company called Recology. They have crews that collect this garbage daily but a bit later in the story we find out the city itself all but gave up on enforcing anti-dumping laws during the pandemic and things haven’t returned to normal. Even last year, the city wasn’t making much of an effort.

Recology responded to more than 100,000 of those 311 calls last year, said Robert Reed, a company spokesman, collecting 8.8 million pounds of abandoned waste or illegally dumped
trash — a decline of about 2 million pounds from the high point of the pandemic…

The city has tried to curb illegal dumping — with little success. If crews can figure out who dumped the trash, they will issue citations, Milton said. In 2020, the Board of Supervisors
raised top fines for trash dumping to $1,000 per act, per day…

A review of Public Works citation data shows that in 2019, department employees issued close to 17,000 warnings and citations related to illegal trash dumping. That number plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, to about 2,200 in 2020 and about 3,800 the following year. Last year, inspectors issued about 6,600 citations.

When you stop punishing people for dumping trash, word gets around. Illegal dumping surged just as enforcement dropped to a fraction of what it had been. Maybe there’s some justification for giving people stuck at home during the pandemic a break, but even if that’s true, why not return to normal when the rest of the world is returning to normal in 2022?

The city had plans to install license plate readers to catch people dumping trash from their cars. It was supposed to happen in 2020 but the plan was put off so the city could shop for a new vendor for the cameras. Now they’re supposedly ready to implement the plan again. That should help. Get the number of citations up to the 2019 baseline and you’ll see a decline in trash on the streets.

Similarly, San Francisco could try putting shoplifters in jail, arresting drug dealers and keeping the homeless from turning the train system into a flop house. That might help with some of their other ongoing problems. Those ideas about basic public order seem to have largel yfallen out of fashion in SF and are only just now being talked about again. But starting with the trash is a good idea. No one wants to live in a city where garbage clogs the streets and sidewalks.