Shopping Carts

Taking a cue from nearby cities, Tustin is also investigating ways to deal with abandoned shopping carts. City Council members debated the issue this week, saying they might be willing to challenge a recent state law that restricts how shopping carts can be collected. "We have to crack down," Mayor Tracy Wills Worley said. "We're not going to put up with this blight."

City officials will ask the League of California Cities to sponsor state legislation that would repeal a 1996 bill restricting how cities can rid streets of abandoned shopping carts. The proposal would repeal the mandate that shopping cart owners be given three days' notice to pick up abandoned carts before cities can retrieve them, said Kristine Thalman, the city's intergovernmental and community relations officer.

In The Times on July 11, the Anaheim City Council announced that it will try to repeal the shopping cart law. It wants to hold the owners of the carts responsible for picking them up. The owners are not the ones causing the blight on Anaheim streets. Why not hold the people responsible who use them for strollers, laundry carts and shopping carts to take home or leave in the streets as they see fit? I have been a resident of Anaheim for more than 30 years, and I see this go on every day. To put the burden on the store owner only is unfair.

They swooped into the supermarket parking lot, walkie-talkies in hand, just as the contraband was unloaded from a rickety red pickup. "Got 'em," Eric Grossman muttered as he and Gilberto Cornejo moved in on the cargo. The contraband driver smiled weakly, walked away and sat on a curb under a tree, feigning indifference as the investigators picked over their haul of rusting, wobbling shopping carts.

They swooped into the supermarket parking lot, walkie-talkies in hand, just as the contraband was unloaded from a rickety red pickup. "Got 'em," Eric Grossman muttered as he and Gilberto Cornejo moved in on the cargo. The contraband driver smiled weakly, walked away and sat on a curb under a tree, feigning indifference as the investigators picked over their haul of rusting, wobbling shopping carts.

To rid streets of shopping carts, the City Council today will consider an ordinance to deal with lost, stolen or abandoned carts. The proposed ordinance includes the immediate impounding of shopping carts that impede emergency services or do not have identification. Those with identification, but where the cart owner has agreed to waive the three-day notice to retrieve the property, will also be picked up immediately.

City leaders have approved Anaheim's first ordinance aimed at removing abandoned shopping carts from streets. The City Council recently gave the nod for the ordinance, which offers incentives for shopping cart owners to remove carts from streets immediately after they are abandoned. The law also imposes fines if shopping cart owners fail more than three times within six months to pick up abandoned carts.

Abandoned shopping carts are a blight on streets from Beverly Hills to Woodland Hills. They represent theft that we pay for at the checkout stand. This Target shopping cart I photographed sat on the Canoga Avenue on-ramp to the 101 freeway for approximately three weeks before anyone removed it. I have asked the management of every store in my neighborhood what they would do if I walked out of their store with merchandise that I had not paid for.

Robert Hosey grinned with pride Monday as he showed off the spanking new shopping cart he received in exchange for a battered old one. "This one's a Cadillac," the 60-year-old homeless man said as he filled the new cart with his bedroll and crushed aluminum beer cans. "I love it." Hosey received one of the first of 100 carts bought by homeless activists and distributed on downtown's skid row in response to police confiscation of store-owned carts.