SAN JOSE — San Jose homeowners are closer to the day they will no longer see city bills for trash collection every couple months, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have to pay for it.

For the taxman cometh, and city officials have concluded he’s better at bill collecting than they are. So homeowners will pay for their trash collection along with their county property taxes in twice-yearly installments starting in 2015, just like they do for sewer service under a plan the City Council approved on a 7-3 vote Tuesday.

“It is substantially better for our ratepayers,” Mayor Chuck Reed said in supporting the change city leaders say will ease future rate hikes.

Councilmen Ash Kalra, Don Rocha and Xavier Campos were opposed, favoring efforts to streamline in-house billing, and Councilman Pete Constant was out of town on city business. Campos argued that billing twice yearly through property taxes will be a hardship for some who now pay every couple months, not always on time.

“This is just one more thing getting attached to the tax bill,” Campos said.

However, city officials said that of 1,100 customers who responded to a survey, more than half favored less-frequent billing cycles and nearly two-thirds said the change would not create a financial hardship.

San Jose officials have been flirting with the idea of switching trash billing to the county tax payments for more than a year as a way to save money on invoicing and staffing. The council voted in January to outsource billing either to the contract haulers or the county tax collector. City officials have concluded it would be cheaper to have the county tax collector handle billing than the trash haulers.

Tuesday’s vote approved a plan in which the city’s 210,000 single-family households will pay for trash pickup through their property tax bill. The city will continue to directly bill the city’s 3,500 multifamily apartments and 60 mobile home parks, having concluded that those accounts cannot be easily transitioned to the county’s property tax collection system. The city also would handle billing-related inquiries for all residential garbage collection customers.

Under the approved time frame, the first city “recycle plus” trash pickup billing through property tax collections would begin in July 2015.

City officials said the change would save about $3.2 million a year, lessening the need to raise rates by avoiding costs for city staffing and customized billing software. City officials said software upgrades could cost $16 million, an additional $14.40 a year per household. The move would eliminate about two dozen city jobs. But city officials aren’t expecting layoffs and plan on easing employees out of those jobs through attrition and reassignment.

The switch to property tax billing also would require elimination of a slightly cheaper, smaller can option that had been offered in hope of encouraging residents to throw away less and recycle more. Beginning in 2015, the 20-gallon cart service will be eliminated for the approximately 7,400 customers — 3.5 percent — who use them. They will be have to use the standard 32-gallon cart.

Another casualty of the change would be revenue the city has received through late payment fees. That amounts to about $2.1 million a year, which the city has used to pay for everything from homeless encampment cleanup to billing subsidies for the poor. City officials said other funding sources would have to be found to continue paying for those programs.

Contact John Woolfolk at 408-975-9346. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/johnwoolfolk1.