OAKLAND — Despite the millions the city spends on a campaign to keep trash from flowing into the bay even regulators deem “progressive,” its efforts are falling short of state requirements.

Unless Oakland can come up with more effective plans and the funding to pay for them, the city faces fines for allowing too many pollutants into its stormwater.

By July 1, Oakland and 69 other cities and government agencies in the region are supposed to reduce the amount of trash they wash into the bay by 75 percent from 2009 levels.

“We’re not going to make that first compliance target. We’re not going to be close,” Oakland Public Works’ Lesley Estes said at a public works committee meeting in late April. But the city is not alone, she said.

Last year, when the reduction target was 60 percent, the State Water Resources Board calculated that the city reduced its trash production by 44.6 percent. Oakland avoided potential fines of $10 per excess gallon by negotiating a plan for ramping up its efforts.

Estes estimates Oakland will have a 15 percent higher rating for its trash reduction efforts this year, bringing it close to 60 percent less than 2009’s output. That is not enough to meet this year’s target, but a substantial improvement over last year.

“We’re all struggling to make this happen,” Estes said, citing Berkeley, San Leandro, Albany, Alameda, Richmond and San Jose as also falling below the target rate. Last year, 25 other cities and agencies fell short. This year, that number has grown to 43, Estes said.

“They’ve been going after it pretty aggressively and dealing with it with a lot of initiative,” the agency’s Dale Bowyer said of Oakland’s efforts.

“I would characterize their efforts as progressive. But Oakland has serious challenges,” Bowyer said.

In an interview, Estes estimated the city spends $12 million to $14 million to clean up trash and keep it out of storm drains.

Those efforts include combating illegal dumping, street sweeping, banning styrofoam packaging and plastic shopping bags, cleaning up homeless encampments, conducting volunteer cleanup campaigns and investing in infrastructure.

But Oakland “is being seen as a struggling city that needs to do more,” she told the committee.

The city takes issue with some of the water board’s ways of calculating its efforts. The board discounts Oakland’s street sweeping program because it was in place before the permit guidelines were issued, for example.

Volunteer cleanup programs earn the city more credit toward compliance targets than both street sweeping and efforts to reduce illegal dumping, Estes said.

In meetings with water board staff, she said, the city intends to develop an alternate plan, which she hopes will be agreed upon by early 2018, with strategies and the means to pay for them made clear. Such arrangements spared the city from being penalized last year.

To blame the regulations “is sort of like sticking your head in the sand,” said David Lewis, executive director of the nonprofit Save the Bay

“There is no such thing as an alternative plan,” he said at the meeting.

“We want to help the city succeed. We know the regulations; we helped the water board write them,” he said.

The city has two new hydrodynamic separator units paid for with money from a bond voters approved last year. The $1.5 million to $2 million devices are an addition to the city’s 30 mesh screen systems in storm drains that trap trash.

In her preliminary budget proposal, Mayor Libby Schaaf cited the financial risks that not meeting state water quality requirements pose for the city’s coffers. Beyond potential fines, the city could face third-party lawsuits, such as one that cost San Jose $100 million to settle last year.

But in the budget proposal presented to the council, every watershed infrastructure improvement is unfunded, as council member Dan Kalb pointed out in budget deliberations at the May 16 council meeting.

The committee asked for more details about the city’s exposure to fines if it cannot meet the 70 percent trash reduction target, for measures the council could consider in upcoming budget deliberations and a timeline for the work.

The topic will be revisited Tuesday at the public works committee’s meeting, at 11:30 a.m. at City Hall.