City aims to cut cart theft

An estimated 300 shopping carts are stolen from Shelton stores each year, and the city is considering adopting laws governing them.

The members of the Shelton City Council and city staff have devoted two work sessions, on June 11 and Aug. 13, to talking about adopting shopping cart ordinances designed to help prevent their theft. At the Aug. 13 session, they discussed a proposed ordinance to introduce at the council’s regular meeting Sept. 3.

Mayor Eric Onisko said he hand-delivered copies of the proposed shopping cart ordinances to the managers of Fred Meyer, Safeway and Walmart on Aug. 12.

“I’m all for moving this forward and waiting for feedback from some of these grocery stores,” Onisko said. “I still think locking mechanisms is our best way out of this.”

In the proposed ordinance, businesses with 15 or fewer shopping carts, or with less than 3,000 square feet of retail space, would be exempt from the proposed regulations.

The Shelton Walmart has about 800 shopping carts, the mayor said.

“The carts aren’t coming from Shop & Hop or O’Reilly’s Auto Parts,” he said. “They’re coming from Safeway, Fred Meyer and Walmart, so why don’t we just require them to lock those wheels and that’s probably 99 percent of our problem.”

The proposed ordinance states that “shopping carts that are removed from the premises of a business and left abandoned on public or private property throughout the city can create conditions of blight in the community, obstruct free access to sidewalks, streets and other right of ways, interfere with pedestrian and vehicular traffic on pathways, driveways, public and private streets, impede emergency services, or pose other dangers.”

Jae Hill, the city’s community development and economic director, said the proposed ordinance would require the bigger stores to have “security measures” to prevent the removal of shopping carts from the store’s property. They can include electronically activated self-braking wheels, poles mounted to the shopping carts that prevent them from being taken outside, bollards, chains, the use of a cart patrol and retrieval company, dedicated security personnel and other measures.

Under the proposal, the shopping carts must have identification signs. The city would use the signs to notify the owner of a lost, stolen or abandoned shopping cart. The store owner would reimburse the city for the pickup and return of the carts.

The proposed ordinance also calls for charging anyone removing a cart from a store’s property with shopping cart theft, a misdemeanor. Anyone who knowingly possesses a shopping cart without the written permission of the owner could be charged with possession of stolen property in the third degree, a gross misdemeanor.