A loaded refuse truck weighs about as much as a dozen passenger cars. Since June 2025, the cities it drives for have not been allowed to bill for the damage. On January 1, 2027, they will be again.
On August 27, 2026, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 922 (Stats. 2026, ch. 148), which amends Vehicle Code section 9400.8 to say that a charge a local agency builds into its rates for public services to recover the cost of street repair is not a charge "for the privilege of using its streets." The bill names the decision it is written to undo: Rogers v. City of Redlands (2025) 112 Cal.App.5th 667, in which the Fourth District held that a street-repair component embedded in Redlands' solid waste rates violated section 9400.8. The amendment takes effect January 1, 2027.
For cities, counties and special districts that fund pavement from their refuse, water and sewer enterprises, the bill restores a practice many had followed for decades and some had suspended after Rogers. It does not restore it unconditionally. What follows is the statute's history, what the Court of Appeal decided, what SB 922 changes, and what it leaves exactly where it was.
A 1989 statute written for weight fees
Section 9400.8 dates from 1989, when the Legislature raised the state's truck weight fees as part of the transportation package that became Proposition 111 on the June 1990 ballot. Alongside the increase, SB 286 (Stats. 1989, ch. 1337) added a one-sentence promise to the trucking industry: if the voters approved the measure, "no local agency may impose a tax, permit fee, or other charge for the privilege of using its streets or highways, other than a permit fee for extra legal loads," unless the agency had imposed the fee before June 1, 1989. The voters approved, and the sentence became operative.
For fifteen years the section drew little attention. Then in County Sanitation Dist. No. 2 v. County of Kern (2005) 127 Cal.App.4th 1544, the Fifth District struck down a county "biosolids impact fee" of $3.37 per ton, imposed to repair roads damaged by trucks hauling treated sludge to farmland. The county argued the fee was for road damage, not road use. The court saw no difference: "a road maintenance or impact fee is simply one type of fee for the privilege of using a road." It read section 9400.8 as part of a scheme in which the state occupies the field of charges based on the weight of legal loads, and it found no implied exception for charges that recover the damage those loads cause.
What happened in Redlands
Redlands runs its own solid waste collection. In 2012 the city commissioned an engineering study that put the annual street damage from refuse vehicles at about $3.6 million, adopted a pavement repair program, and directed that the solid waste enterprise transfer that amount each year to the street program. Its 2017 rate ordinance set bi-monthly refuse rates that recovered part of the cost, and the city's answer in the litigation conceded as much: the rates were calculated to fund the transfer.
A ratepayer sued in 2021, as a putative class, for a writ of mandate, declaratory relief and a refund. The trial court bifurcated the case. In phase one it held that the street-repair component was a charge for the privilege of using city streets under section 9400.8. In phase two it held that refunds were available only to customers who had paid under protest, and the plaintiff had not. Both sides appealed, and on June 4, 2025, the Court of Appeal affirmed both rulings. The opinion was certified for publication on June 30, and the Supreme Court denied review on August 20, 2025.
The city's main argument was that its customers pay for trash service by volume, not for road use. The court answered that the rate "incorporates, in part, the charge for the PARIS program," that the charge "is based on the estimated damage done to the roads by garbage trucks," and that the money "is then transferred to the PARIS program." The city's engineer had measured road wear by vehicle weight, which the court treated as a concession rather than, as the city put it, "just physics." Relabeling the charge as a cost of service did not take it outside Kern.
The city's second argument was Proposition 218. The Court of Appeal had said in Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. v. City of Roseville (2002) 97 Cal.App.4th 637 that a city "may charge its water, sewer, and refuse utilities for the street, alley and right-of-way costs attributed to the utilities," and in Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. v. City of Fresno (2005) 127 Cal.App.4th 914 that the added cost of garbage trucks on the streets is real. Redlands asked the court to harmonize those cases with section 9400.8 by letting a trash utility recover all of its costs, including street repair. The court declined. Neither Roseville nor Fresno had considered section 9400.8, and article XIII D itself says it provides no new authority to impose any fee or charge. The section had barred the charge for six years before Proposition 218 passed, and nothing in Proposition 218 repealed the bar.
The holding reached well past Redlands. Agencies across the state had built the same component into refuse, water and sewer rates on the strength of Roseville. Some, like Oxnard, amended their rate ordinances to strip it out; others faced new suits over it. The League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties and the Rural County Representatives of California, which had appeared as amici in Rogers, sponsored SB 922 the next session.
The refund ruling that survives
The part of Rogers that SB 922 does not touch is the second holding, and it matters to anyone on either side of a rate dispute. Health and Safety Code section 5472 provides that once a sanitation or sewer agency fixes its rates, "any person may pay such fees, rates, tolls, rentals or other charges under protest and bring an action" to recover them, in the manner provided for tax refund suits in the Revenue and Taxation Code. The court held that refuse collection charges are rates fixed under that article, so the pay-under-protest requirement applied, and a customer who had simply paid his bill could not recover a refund even though the charge was illegal.
That holding fits with the Supreme Court's decision this August in Tesoro Refining & Marketing Co. v. City of Carson, discussed here. Tesoro held that the Government Claims Act displaces refund procedures a city writes into its own ordinances, but it expressly preserved refund procedures prescribed by state statute. Section 5472 is one of those. For refuse, water and sewer rates, the road to a refund still runs through a payment under protest.
What SB 922 does
The bill leaves the 1989 prohibition in place as subdivision (a) of section 9400.8 and adds a subdivision (b):
(1) A fee, charge, surcharge, or a component thereof, imposed upon the provider of, or ratepayer for, public services by, or for, a local agency to recover the cost of street maintenance and repair and other costs associated with the use of its streets, roads, or highways to provide public services is not a tax, permit fee, or other charge for the privilege of using streets or highways that is prohibited under subdivision (a). (2) Nothing in this code prohibits a local agency from imposing or collecting a fee, charge, or surcharge described in paragraph (1).
The uncodified findings do two things. They recite the local agencies' existing authority under article XI, sections 7 and 9 of the Constitution to provide services such as refuse collection, water and power and to charge rates that defray the cost, and they state the Legislature's intent "to reject the interpretation given to the law in Rogers v. City of Redlands." The carve-out reaches both forms the charge usually takes: a component of the rate the customer pays, and a charge imposed on the provider, which covers a street-impact payment written into a franchise agreement with a private hauler.
It is worth noticing what the Legislature chose not to do. The version of the bill that reached the Assembly Local Government Committee in June would have narrowed the entire prohibition to charges "based on weight," which would have freed local agencies to charge for street use for any purpose, so long as the charge was not calculated by weight. The committee's analysis flagged the risk, with the California Building Industry Association warning of new construction-related fees and the Governor's 2019 veto of a Lombard Street reservation-fee bill as an example of what the prohibition still prevents. The bill was amended on July 2 to leave subdivision (a) as it was. The general bar on charging for the privilege of using local streets remains. What is new is a defined safe harbor for recovering the cost of providing public services.
What SB 922 does not do
It does not change Proposition 218 or Proposition 26. Section 9400.8 was the only ground on which Rogers was decided; the trial court rejected the plaintiff's article XIII D claims, and the Court of Appeal did not reach them. Those claims are now the whole contest. Refuse, water and sewer charges are property-related fees under article XIII D, section 6, which means the revenue may not be used for any purpose other than the one for which the fee was imposed, and the amount may not exceed the proportional cost of the service attributable to the parcel. Roseville allowed a city to charge its utilities for the street costs attributed to them, and then struck the fee because the city had made no showing that it reasonably represented those costs. A street-impact payment imposed on a franchised hauler is tested under Proposition 26 instead, and after Zolly v. City of Oakland (2022) 13 Cal.5th 780 a franchise fee is a tax unless the agency can bring it within one of the exceptions, each of which is cost-based.
The safe harbor is itself cost-based. Subdivision (b)(1) protects a charge "to recover the cost of street maintenance and repair and other costs associated with the use of" the streets to provide the service. A component set above the measured cost, or allocated to a customer class out of proportion to that class's share of the damage, is not a charge the paragraph describes, and it falls back under subdivision (a) as well as under the constitutional limits. The engineering study that Redlands relied on was prepared in 2012 and was never the problem in Rogers. Under SB 922 it is the first thing a challenger will read.
It is not retroactive by its terms. The amendment operates on January 1, 2027. The findings describe the bill as stating "clearly" what the law is and as rejecting Rogers, which is the language of a clarifying amendment, and a court deciding a pending suit over charges collected before 2027 will give that declaration due consideration. It will not be bound by it: a later Legislature's view of what an earlier statute meant is entitled to weight, not deference. (Western Security Bank v. Superior Court (1997) 15 Cal.4th 232, 244.) The Rogers judgment itself is final, and the writ against Redlands' surcharge stands.
What public agencies should do now
Decide whether to restore the component, and when. An agency that stripped street-repair costs from its rates after Rogers can put them back in a rate proceeding that takes effect on or after January 1, 2027. For refuse, water and sewer rates that means a Proposition 218 notice, hearing and protest process, which takes months to run. Start the cost-of-service study now.
Refresh the engineering. The study must identify the street costs attributable to the service vehicles, explain the allocation among customer classes, and show that the transfer to the street fund does not exceed those costs. A study more than a few years old, or one that allocates by a method the rate consultant cannot defend on the stand, is the weak point.
Write the ordinance to the statute. Describe the component as what subdivision (b)(1) says it is: a charge to recover the cost of street maintenance and repair associated with the use of streets to provide the service. Keep the funds identifiable. Redlands' transfers between two named funds were easy to trace, which is what a court will expect to see.
Review the franchise agreements. A street-impact payment imposed on a hauler is within the safe harbor under the Vehicle Code, but it is still a charge "imposed" by the agency for purposes of Proposition 26. The agreement and the staff report should state the cost basis.
Do not assume SB 922 ends a pending suit. A challenge to charges collected before 2027 is still governed by Rogers unless a court accepts the Legislature's declaration as a statement of what section 9400.8 always meant. Evaluate the exposure, and remember that section 5472 limits refunds to customers who paid under protest.
For ratepayers and haulers
The other side of the same rules. A business or property owner who believes a refuse, water or sewer rate is carrying more than its share of street costs has, after January 1, no claim under the Vehicle Code, and a claim under article XIII D that turns on the agency's cost study. A hauler negotiating a franchise should expect a street-impact component and should ask for the engineering behind it. And anyone who intends to challenge a rate should pay it under protest from the first bill. Rogers won his case and recovered nothing.
