City officials have balked at penalizing residents for taking carts, saying store owners refuse to prosecute customers in court.
"I don't think any police officer would ever, ever write a ticket for somebody taking a cart," said Los Angeles City Councilman Greig Smith.
Cardenas' proposal would place most of the responsibility for controlling carts on stores, mirroring a law adopted by the Glendale City Council two years ago.
Glendale's policy requires city code enforcement officers to count carts at local grocery and retail outlets. If managers are missing more than five carts on any given day, they are required to devise a way to keep them on their property. Most retailers have installed electronic systems that cause a cart's wheels to lock if someone tries to roll them out of parking lots.
Officials said they enacted the measure to address hurdles created by a 1997 state law that requires municipalities to give retailers 72 hours to pick up abandoned carts.
"It tripled our problem, because rather than have one day of carts on the street, we had three days of carts on the street," said Sam Engel, Glendale's neighborhood services administrator. "We decided the only way that's going to work in Glendale is to actually stop the carts from getting out on the street; there was no way we could collect them fast enough."
City representatives repeatedly visited store managers and worked to persuade customers to use personal carts to transport items off site. Today, most of Glendale's homeless carry their belongings in backpacks, and some have Jimenez's cellphone number, which they reach for immediately when they find that a cart filled with their things is missing.
Although code enforcement officers met some initial resistance to the shopping cart law, store owners today say the measure has helped cut their operating budgets, because they do not have to replace lost carts at an average of $135 apiece.
A Target store at the Glendale Galleria installed a containment system to comply with the city's ordinance.
"We prefer to keep the carts and keep our prices low for our guests," said Steve Linders, a Target spokesman.
With a steep drop in abandoned trolleys, enforcement officer Jimenez's cart-identifying skills are growing rusty. After passing a cart on a busy street near the city's center, he pegged it as belonging to "a Target, or a Staples."
But, on closer inspection, he discovered he was wrong:
"Nope, it's Office Depot."
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jennifer.oldham@latimes.com
