Last March 9, I came across these abandoned shopping carts on the Dave Clark Riverfront Path at Sherman Street.
For years Albany has struggled with stolen shopping carts being abandoned all over the place. Now the city will try something new.
City law already requires stores, when notified, to pick up stolen carts within 72 hours or pay a $50 fine. I don’t know how often such notifications are made or if any fines have ever been imposed.
On Wednesday, the city council adopted an ordinance requiring stores to put in place “containment measures” if they have six or more cart violations over six months.
Acceptable containment measures include wheel locks that prevent carts from being taken from the premises, or barriers “such as bollards or cart corrals that restrict cart removal.”
It’s not clear what amounts to a violation committed by a store. Presumably it means not putting the store’s name and a phone number on carts, or not collecting an abandoned cart within 72 hours after being notified of where it is.
Stores will have 90 days to install “containment measures” after the police tell them to do so, or to get an extension from the police chief. Failure to comply means an additional fine of up to $250.
“Over the last year,” the city staff told the council in a memo, “city staff and Adopt a Park [a volunteer program] have recovered, returned and/or disposed of hundreds of shopping carts. During one cleaning effort, city staff removed over 170 shopping carts from Periwinkle Creek.”
The new requirement for keeping carts from leaving the premises — after six “violations” — presumably takes effect in 30 days.
It always seems to me that these requirements punish the stores, the victims of cart theft, instead of the thieves.
The city says stores must post signs saying that removing carts is a crime. Well, if it’s a crime, has there ever been an arrest when an officer on patrol sees somebody pushing a shopping cart down the street? (hh)
Why don’t we have a POLICE FORCE that interrogates “cart drivers” that are more than a block from the store? Because we have an ineffectual PD!
Are they going to fine residents that have been burglarized and their possessions later discarded? What’s the difference than fining stores?
Let’s starting fining the mayor/council for their asinine decisions. Treble damages.
I agree with you about officers stopping and “fining” people with carts that have been taken from a store that has followed the “city law” that it’s a crime to remove a cart. If it’s a crime to the City then the person should pay for said crime.
and where is this person who stold a shopping cart supposed to get the money to pay the fine?
how many cops @ a cost to tax payers of $200 an hour each, do you want on “cart patrol”?
i understand that nobody wants carts in a creek but this is an issue for the stores to solve.
All you’re doing is criminalizing homelessness
Being homeless isn’t a crime STEALING is! Being poor. Being homeless. Does NOT give the right or excuse STEAL..
Spot on!
No. It would be criminalizing theft which is it’s intended point.
Let’s put the blame where the blame really is The person who is stealing the carts. It is ridiculous to find stores and penalize them when our police department does absolutely nothing to the thieves that are taking the carts in the first place. If they enforce the law and started arresting people every time they see them with a cart that they know is stolen you’re going to see a whole lot fewer carts left in places . Maybe if these cart thieves got a few days of community service collecting these carts they wouldn’t be so willing to steal the carts.
Not all cart thieves are homeless. Why would you presume that? A sense of entitlement?
I’ve seen what appear to be “immigrant women” with a handful of kids and a cart full of groceries nearly a mile away from the store.
I mean… I’m not opposed at all to making uncontrolled homelessness a crime. I’m not sure what the downside to that would be.
Cleaner streets? Less drug use? Fewer drug deals outside the bottle drop?
1 down side would be the cost to tax payers to jail a person @ $150 a day
a 2nd down side is the cost of $200 an hour to have a cop on the street
it would be less of a cost to taxpayers to rent a homeless person an apartment than to jail them and somehow expect them to pay their fine
How about moving the photo radar cameras to grocery store parking lots and fine the people taking the carts?
Photo radar cameras are to enrich the city. People stealing carts have no money. Significantly less than the 6k per intersection fee the city pays.
I am with Bill here, make it a violation to have possession of a shopping cart because no one sells their carts, with the penalty being something like $999 and 30 days in jail anytime someone is caught with a shopping cart. Do that and you will stop the theft of carts as soon as word gets around the low life network. The idea that you fine the victim of crime is just aberrant behavior.
Next year they can drag shopping carts from oak creek
Sounds like a whole lot of Extortion and punishment placed on the victims!! We have a police force that drives by a crime being committed and do nothing. It’s a crime in progress all over the city! If it was a stolen car,they might arrest the driver instead of the victim.
Why are we always punishing the businesses? Punish those who are committing the crimes.
Pretty soon there will be no businesses left in Albany.
I agree with the others; The burden should be on the thieves, not the victims of the crime. That is just so wrong and backwards.
I agree with Rich and Bill. Why should the businesses that have carts stolen have to pay a fine. Makes as much sense as fining a store for having items shoplifted. They should pay twice????
I agree businesses shouldn’t have to pay a fine, however, it will be the customers that pay the fine…they will just increase prices to cover this fine. Do you honestly think a business is going to deduct this fine from profits.
If I’m correct most of the carts are stolen by homeless, is this correct. Does the city actually believe they are going to walk into Albany Court and pay a fine?
We called in about an abandoned cart. It took 3 phone calls and 2 weeks before it was picked up.
What do you suppose one of those shopping carts cost? If hundreds of them are being pulled out of creeks and ditches and being disposed of yearly, we’re all paying for replacements in our grocery bills. I’m for Mr. Kellum’s solution.
As WRONG as it is, my guess is they’re going to punish whoever they can get the most money out of.
The city counsil has no common sense anymore just fine business, let the vagrants run amuck, the police look the other away to much of a hassel for them and anyway the prosecuters won’t do their job
I agree with Jacob. That is, “all you are doing is criminalizing homelessness.” Hope none of you or your loved ones winds up homeless some day.
If my loved ones were homeless and they resorted to stealing, I would hope that they get caught, punished and find a better way to survive without being a thief.
If your “loved ones were homeless and they resorted to stealing”, I would hope that you loved them enough to want to help them and not sit idly by judging them and wishing for their “capture and punishment”.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they stole JUST ONE and took care of it instead of dumping it somewhere and stealing another later. You rarely see a person pushing a cart TO a store.
It’s not a crime to homeless but it’s a crime to steal and it’s a crime to litter. Homeless folks can’t be allowed to break laws just because they’re homeless. Fining the business is ridiculous.
I don’t know what jail these people would be put in. Do you realize that there is no “JAIL” in the police building? There is a “DETENTION ROOM’ for temporary holding. The Linn County Jail doesn’t have the space and if they did these people would/could not be detained if a more serious offender was lodged.
This is just a knee jerk action by the council and will have no more effect on the cart problem then anything done to date.
Does the LC jail house prisoners from OTHER jurisdictions? If so, maybe we need to build a bigger jail & go into the “jail business” for profit?
So you would vote to have the city spend millions to build a larger jail to incarcerate cart-scofflaws & taggers. Like that will ever happen… LOL.
There are beds dedicated for City use in the Linn County Jail.
I agree that the stores should not be fined and blaming the homeless for all the thefts are wrong (but they are to blame for a lot of the cart thefts). Oh, we are paying for the lost/stolen carts, you can count on that!!! The stores will find a way to recoup the loss!!
It wouldn’t hurt if the people in Albany would step up and return found carts themselves … or maybe with all the extra $$ the city has, they could hire a parttime cart collector!!??
Amazing the angst…
So, if local PD sees/stops a person rolling a cart down the street and the person says they found it on the street abandoned, and there’s no store information on the cart – then what? Toss ’em in jail. That’s the ticket. We have so ample number of PD and jail space to to hold them and give them an attorney in order to accomplish what? Ya – Debtor’s prisons always worked so well…
I doubt you’d have the same attitude about taggers defacing “plaza street”.
This wasn’t a problem before you joined the city council. There are so many illegal things that could be curtailed if the police sent a message with a zero tolerance policy toward these “unsightly” crimes like dumped carts, graffiti and other general lack of civility.
Once the perps realize that, they’ll stop or move on. We need police to enforce and judges who sentence these perps to oodles of community service.
So, there wasn’t a cart problem before I got on council… Right. I’ll try it again: I get that you and others don’t like the existing situation, but your so-called “solutions” are non-starters IMO. Where are you going to get these extra cops to do your bidding? Who’s going to pay for them? If you’re implying city just re-assign existing folks – what duties will they not be doing while looking for cart-scofflaws? And the “Book-em Danoi” is meaningless considering space available…
Well, for one, they don’t seem to be patrolling streets with traffic cameras. Use the camera revenue to hire more officers to actually
DO policing. Oh wait, the camera revenue is probably going towards other council follies.
It was a much smaller prob;em. Carts “wandered”, but they didn’t end up in creeks etc. on such a regular basis. As long as bad behavior is tolerated, the more it will become the norm.
funny that I remember pulling carts put of a creek when i was a boy scout, i am now 65 years old so yes there has been a cart issue for 50 years
What if the stores set up a reward or something of the sort $25.00 for returning carts from the wild? It’d be better than fines to the store. Albany won’t be getting new stores if they know how hard it is to be a store here. Implementing all these weird and unnecessary rules to them won’t make business want to come to Albany
What keeps people from “stealing” carts just to return them a few minutes later?
I would like to start a shopping cart retrieval business. Have a phone number that someone would call. And I would come remove the shopping cart wherever it is. Maybe the city would pay for that. Or the stores could pay instead of getting fined.
If you “pay” anyone for returning carts more of them will be stolen. It would give people more income than collecting bottles lol. The city’s attempts to fine people is getting out of control. Their reactionary solutions to complicated problems are just a way to make a quick easy buck rather than solving the root causes.
How much time has this issue taken up? Criminalize use of a shopping cart off it’s original lot. Just utilize community police and the store to go out and pick them up and return them. Adding a criminal situation to a problem we think is probably due to the homeless is disgusting. Stopping people using a cart is ridiculous. Labeling the homeless as “low life” is elitist and you should be ashamed. Fines, criminal records, court appearances that are not going to happen, what get’s solved. Just work together to get them returned and picked up. Organize a way to clear the creeks just like we do yearly clean up drives. Must everything be complicated.
Dear Judith, Making excuses for thieves is a problem, a thief is a low life,. or maybe you should publish your address and say you will leave your belongings outside so they can be stolen, or publish your address and announce you will leave your doors open so that portion of the “wonderful folks” who steal, (not all homeless by any means) can come by and avail themselves of your goodies.
Judge Roy Bean was purported to have said ” We are not hanging you because you stole the horse, we are hanging you so horses will not be stolen.”
Collect a deposit for using a cart, if not returned the user pays for the cart. The price of stolen, damaged carts or cart security systems are in our grocery bills already. Users need to be responsible and return carts to a secure location to reclaim the deposit. Let’s start at a $25 deposit and see who leaves their cart in the parking lot.
I’ll suggest that if any retailer started to charge the customer, they would see a very precipitous drop in customers! I can see it now: “Line starts here to pay for your cart… When done shopping, get back in line #2 to drop off your cart & get a refund.” :-)
Roth’s supermarket has an employee take your cart out to your car for you. Then they return it immediately to the store. If stores could be given incentives to do this…
But of couse nothing like this will happen even though Kroger, Target, and others can well afford to hire people to escort carts.
Tesco stores (UK) have a one pound cart deposit. You get your one pound coin back when you take the cart back. It’s all mechanized. No hiring necessary.
Fining and jailing won’t work. All current laws are ignored, not enforced. My husband retrieves 5 carts a week. And it’s a small area. He has written to, talked to, and yelled at store managers to no effect.
…”Fining and jailing won’t work.”….
Who have they fined and/or jailed and then had them repeat the crime? Until they ACTUALLY fine and/or jail someone, you have no basis to say it doesn’t work.
we as a society have been jailing and fining people for the last 250 years yet we still have crime so you plan on jailing & fining has not worked out very well so far perhaps its time to try something else
This article does not mention this being an issue caused by the homeless ,this article is not about the homeless, yet somehow it became about the homeless..what about the young mother who had her 3 small children corraled in a shopping cart as they waited for the bus. Should we arrest her for cart removal because she didn’t have the driver wait while she returned the cart. What about people who felt they had no option other then use a cart to push their groceries home, or the young couple pushing a shopping cart out of the apartment complex with bags of. Cans to return to bottle drop…or the group of young teens who thought it would be fun to have cart races and when they finished they abandoned the cart…
So why did it become about the homeless? Because it is easier to blame the vulnerable population then to actually put some effort in and look at the big picture.
I get the frustration with abandoned shopping carts cluttering neighborhoods—they’re an eyesore and a hassle. But blaming it all on homeless folks and punishing businesses with new mandates is a knee-jerk reaction that ignores the bigger picture. Homeless people aren’t the only ones taking carts (plenty get swiped for scrap, pranks, or just walking groceries home), but for many unhoused individuals, a cart isn’t theft—it’s a lifeline. When you’re constantly displaced with “you can’t camp here, not there either,” a cart is how you haul your few belongings to the next spot. And let’s be real: there’s often nowhere safe or legal within city limits to exist .
CART removal is a multifaceted issue tied to urban design, consumer behavior, and retail practices, not just one DEMOGRAPHIC…AN ongoing for decades problem that every city needs to deal with.? Citybcouncil perhaps should be asking why cartsremoval is occuring
Then comes enforcement—if someone does get arrested for loitering, trespassing, or whatever minor infraction, cops don’t pack up their stuff. Belongings get left and scavenged or trashed, and the cart? Abandoned or taken by someone else in need of being mobile,, T
his ordinance just shifts the burden to stores without solving why carts end up stray in the first place.
City council, your time, energy,(clearly wasnt much when you thought it a good idea to make this the stores problem so the city can generate another conduit of cash from businesses that dont comply)and our tax dollars should go toward the root: of the problem meanwhile our growing homelessness crisis continues on…maybe city council should look at the several states and cities that have successful housing first programs that have succ3ssfully gotten Invest in affordable housing, mental health support, and job programs that prevent people from ending up on the streets.
Reactive rules like this are not helpful LONG-TERM and create more problems downstream—higher costs for businesses get passed to us consumers..
Let’s demand real solutions that help everyone, not quick fixes that scapegoat the vulnerable.
Excellent comment. I agree with you.
Shocking to read some of the other commenters and their deeply mean-spirited comments. Their comments would even make Scrooge’s blood run cold.
Thanks zell..nice to know there is at least one other person that gets it
..
Agreed that taking a cart off store property is stealing, that stores are the victims of this theft and should not be punished for it, that abandoned carts are an eyesore. But the best solution is one that takes everyone’s rights, needs and desires into account with compassion for the less fortunate. The community might determine the main reasons carts are removed before looking for solutions. Could buses make stops right in front of the stores where its riders shop at certain times of day? Could community members pitch in and provide decent carts for the unhoused to store their personal belongings? I read about a man who made and gave away such carts and bicycle trailers to people who needed them. Please, let us reason together and avoid useless fault-finding.
Vonnie, I had hope when you started writing, but then you made excuses for thieves, what part of thief do you not understand?