McDonald again pushes for shopping cart retrieval

Diana Sahagun

Monday, Dec. 3, 2001 | 8:35 a.m.

Las Vegas Councilman Michael McDonald has revived a crusade to capture wayward shopping carts from neighborhoods and vacant properties.

McDonald will reintroduce a bill Wednesday that will place the burden on stores to retrieve their shopping carts from city streets and neighborhoods. If they don't, the bill gives the city the authority to collect the carts and charge the stores.

The bill was proposed more than a year ago, but McDonald put it on the back burner after it met with industry opposition. McDonald said he made little headway negotiating with stores, so he decided to reintroduce the ordinance.

McDonald said he and his council colleagues share a similar problem -- shopping carts stuck in rights-of-way, cluttering up neighborhoods and irritating residents. More than 100 carts were pulled from McDonald's ward last week, he said. While many stores have their own retrieval service, not all are as proactive, he said.

"It's an eyesore, when you have the carts at bus stops and you have no place to sit because there's so many carts there," McDonald said. "And it's a quality-of-life issue. If you're driving your car, you don't want to be hitting carts. You don't want to have to walk on the streets because there are carts on the sidewalks."

The bill encourages stores to retrieve their own carts, either upon notice by the city or in connection with an ongoing retrieval program. But it also gives the city the option of retrieving abandoned carts and charging fees and penalties for the service.

The city would notify the owner of an abandoned cart and provide a period of time for the cart to be retrieved. If the cart remains, the city would remove it, at a cost of $7.50 per cart and storage fees of $1 per day. The proposed bill also provides for an additional penalty of $50 per cart for repeat offenses.

If the store owner does not pay all of the fees and penalties, the city could decline to renew or suspend the store's business license, which is reviewed twice a year.

The bill will be introduced Wednesday and assigned to a committee before being brought back to the City Council. McDonald said he hopes to hear back from the industry to address any of their concerns.

Councilman Michael Mack, who is co-sponsoring the ordinance, asked for the bill to be delayed last year so he could meet with store owners. He said those meetings were unproductive.

Mack said in his ward, the northwest, some stores are better than others about retrieving their carts. He joked that his two young sons, Aaron and Austin, draw him pictures of the one thing they see most in their area -- shopping carts.

"Being a retailer, I never wanted to have government be the Big Brother to how we govern over their shopping carts," said Mack, a pawn shop owner. "The stores don't want to restrict their customers from taking the carts off premises, even though it's against the law. Just go pick them up once a day, that's all we're asking."