Katie Rodriguez here, thinking about the invisible lines that draw boundaries across our nation, state and within Monterey County, and how those lines shape our thinking about services and resources with more ambiguous boundaries, like water, energy and waste.
When it comes to solid waste, the county is currently split into two systems: East and West.
The East region, which includes inland agricultural areas of Salinas, South County and rural communities such as San Ardo and San Lucas, spans 2,450 square miles and is managed by the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority (SVSWA).
The West region is a third of that size—853 square miles—and includes the Monterey Peninsula, from Castroville and Moss Landing down to Big Sur and Carmel Valley. It’s overseen by ReGen Monterey, and serves a larger share of the County’s population.
For more than a decade, officials have debated how to set rates across these two regions, where the cost drivers vary significantly. Rates, at one point, were unified across both regions but were later separated and deemed unfair. That argument has persisted for more than a decade, with the East-side service considered to be more expensive to provide.
In April 2025, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors asked the Environmental Health Bureau to conduct a commercial rate cost comparison between the two regions. The goal: to understand why East-side customers pay significantly more—averaging around 50 percent higher for the same service—and whether those rates are justified.
These results were presented at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting today, April 28 by Marni Flagg, assistant bureau chief of the Environmental Health Bureau.
“Maintaining separate East and West commercial rate structures reflects the actual cost of providing each service per region,” Flagg told the supervisors. “Standardizing rates would shift the East’s higher operating costs to the West customers, resulting in an inequitable cost allocation.”
The study, conducted by California-based consulting firm MuniEnvironmental, found that geography and waste density are key drivers contributing to higher costs in the East.
In other words, trucks in the East drive longer distances, collecting more volume but with less mass—all of which makes service less efficient on a per-cubic-yard basis. The report also cited higher disposal fees at SVSWA facilities and additional infrastructure steps, with waste traveling through multiple transfer points.
But the presentation also raised questions about whether the study fully addressed the issue at hand. Supervisor Chris Lopez took issue with the framing of the study, and noted the analysis focused on explaining the rate discrepancy, not what the rates should be under a neutral cost-of-service analysis.
“I was asked to look at the data and to make certain that there was support for these rate differences, i.e. fuel and miles and cubic yards and density,” said Jeff Duhamel with MuniEnvironmental. “I had found that there were.”
The broader question is one of equity across communities, Lopez said.
“At the end of the day, we're serving the county as a whole, right?” he said. “I would rather have a fresh look at the differences between the systems to [determine whether] two different rates 54 percent apart, [align] with the values of this board, its mission statement and all the work that we do together.”