BACKGROUND:
The Cathedral City Municipal Code declares the proliferation of abandoned shopping carts on public and private property as a public nuisance and regulates shopping carts in a manner consistent with the Business and Professions Code to mitigate the negative effects abandoned shopping carts have on the community.
These regulations require stores with more than 10 shopping carts to develop, implement, and maintain a shopping cart containment plan to prevent the removal of shopping carts from the premises and to provide for the retrieval of removed and abandoned carts. This plan is to be prepared at the time a store applies for a business license or a certificate of occupancy. The regulations also applied retroactively to existing businesses and contain civil penalties for the failure to establish or maintain a cart containment plan.
In addition to the requirement to establish and maintain a shopping cart containment plan, the regulations also direct the impoundment of abandoned shopping carts. An abandoned shopping cart that does not have an affixed sign identifying the owner may be impounded and disposed of immediately. Carts with identification may be handled in one of two ways:
1. The City may notify a business of an abandoned shopping cart located within the City, giving the owner three business days to retrieve it, after which the City may impound and dispose of the cart; or
2. The City may immediately impound an abandoned shopping cart, giving the owner notice the cart has been impounded within 24 hours from the time it was collected by the City. If the owner retrieves the cart within three business days from the notice, the City is required to release the cart at no cost. The City may recover its costs to impound the cart and fines starting on the fourth business day following the notice and it may dispose of the cart after 30 days.
A $50 fine is imposed on a shopping cart owner for each occurrence in excess of three during a specified six-month period for failure to retrieve shopping carts.
The adopted fee resolution does not contain a specific fee for the impoundment of a shopping cart, although it contains the hourly billing rate for a code compliance officer.
DISCUSSION:
Many Cathedral City businesses responsibly manage their shopping carts and there are some success stories to share with stores that have added wheel locks to their shopping carts to prevent their removal from a property, including Stater Brothers and Cardenas Markets. The City does, however, receive frequent complaints about abandoned shopping carts reported through the MyCathedralCity app. Over the calendar year 2023, the City received 728 reports of abandoned shopping carts, inclusive of those reported by residents, businesses, and City staff through the MyCathedralCity app. For 2022, 445 requests were received.
Abandoned shopping carts are found on streets, sidewalks, landscaping, and drainage areas along commercial corridors and in neighborhoods throughout the City. The stores responsible for the abandoned shopping carts vary by geographic area but include Target, Food4Less, 99 Cents Only Stores, Rite Aid, and Walgreens. While the City does not regulate shopping cart containment plans for stores in other cities, businesses in Palm Springs also contribute to the proliferation of abandoned shopping carts in Cathedral City and their carts are frequently found in the City, including carts from Home Depot, Lowes, Burlington, Aldi, and Staples.
Requests for service related to abandoned shopping carts are received by the Public Works Department. Previously, staff were able to report abandoned shopping carts to a cart retrieval company website, but in the last year the website has been modified to only allow stores to report abandoned carts. Staff can no longer report abandoned shopping carts directly to a retrieval company. Staff also discovered the retrieval companies will not pick up carts from stores they do not have a contract with and some stores have conveyed they will only pay a cart retrieval company if they brought in more than 10 carts at one time, which has led some cart retrieval companies to stop picking up those carts. There are also a limited number of cart retrieval companies in the Coachella Valley.
The current reactive approach that relies on stores and their shopping cart retrieval companies to remove abandoned shopping carts is ineffective – staff does not have an effective means to engage with businesses on their abandoned shopping carts and it often does not produce immediate action. As a result, abandoned shopping carts build up in the city, producing significant visual blight along commercial corridors and in neighborhoods. The Public Works Department picks up abandoned shopping carts that are not collected by a cart retrieval company, typically within a week of their report.
They also perform a sweep of the Dream Homes neighborhood every other month.
Those collections are currently performed without any cost recovery to the City.
Staff efforts to manage shopping cart containment plans have also produced mixed results. Stater Brothers and Cardenas Markets have taken ownership of their shopping carts through wheel locks and are not a significant contributor to the proliferation of shopping carts. In contrast, however, staff has found other stores located in the City to be unresponsive or to have produced shopping cart containment plans that insufficiently manage their carts. Additionally, staff has no ability to manage shopping cart containment plans for businesses located outside of Cathedral City.
Recognizing the proliferation of shopping carts in the City through the MyCathedralCity data and the impacts abandoned shopping carts have on the City and the ineffectiveness of the current approaches to respond to requests for service and manage shopping cart containment plans, a different approach is needed.
The City is limited in its approaches based on its regulations and the Business and Professions Code, although the City can take a more proactive approach in the collection and impoundment of abandoned shopping carts. More specifically, the City can immediately impound an abandoned shopping cart, following the provisions of the ordinance and the Business and Professions Code. The Code Compliance Division will be launching this new approach to encourage businesses to develop containment plans that prevent shopping carts from leaving their property.
Staff has prepared tags to document the impoundment of a shopping cart with a tear off receipt that can be given to a business informing them that one of their carts has been impounded, following the requirements of the ordinance and the Business and Professions Code. Those businesses will have three days to pick up their carts from the Public Works maintenance yard without charge, after which they will be charged the cost of impoundment. Staff will also be tracking the number of violations each business has to be able to charge a $50 fine per day for each violation in excess of three in a six- month period. Carts not picked up in 30 days will be disposed of.
The adopted fee resolution does not contain a specific fee for the impoundment of a shopping cart and needs to be amended to assess this charge on businesses that fail to pick up abandoned shopping carts from the maintenance yard within three days of receiving notice from the City that one of their carts has been impounded.
Staff estimates that it will take approximately 30 minutes to load an abandoned shopping cart, transport it to the maintenance yard, and unload it. While the Public Works Department has had a primary role in the impoundment of shopping carts in the past, and it will continue to have a supporting role together with the Police Department, the new campaign will be led by the Code Compliance Division. The hourly rate for a code compliance officer II is between that of a street maintenance worker and a uniformed police officer and is a reasonable rate to use for the establishment of an abandoned shopping cart impoundment fee. The hourly rate for a code compliance officer II is $139. Therefore, an impoundment fee of $69.50 per cart is recommended.
To illustrate the effect of this change, a business that repeatedly has abandoned shopping carts in the community could face $50 per day fines for each new occurrence and $69.50 fees for each cart impounded by the City. Over a 30-day period of time, the fines could be up to $1,500 and, if 30 carts were impounded in that same period, they could see up to another $2,085 in impoundment fees (actual cost of impoundment).
Separately, code compliance can also cite a business for the failure to maintain a shopping cart containment plan, up to $1,000, plus $50 for each day of noncompliance.
The fines and fees are intended to function as a penalty for those businesses who are failing to maintain control of their shopping carts. The goal remains to continue to work with businesses cooperatively to increase their responsibility for their shopping carts and implementing effective controls and measures that prevent shopping carts from leaving a property, although the clear impoundment fee will give staff more leverage in the enforcement of the Cathedral City Municipal Code.
FISCAL IMPACT:
The adoption of a shopping cart impoundment fee will have a small positive fiscal impact on the General Fund, depending on the number of shopping carts impounded by the City that are not picked up within three days from when they received notice of its collection by the City. The City will incur some expenses, including the purchase of a trailer to collect abandoned shopping carts together with other materials and supplies.
FIVE-YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN:
Goal F: Embracing, inclusive community.
Objective: Cathedral City is valued and respected as a community that welcomes and embraces diversity, has an abundance of high quality and affordable housing options and vibrant businesses. Our neighborhoods are attractive, well-maintained, and issues surrounding homelessness have been compassionately addressed with thoughtful, coordinated, and collaborative programs.
Action F11: Implement a code compliance program that proactively identifies and responds to code compliance complaints.
Action F12: Develop and implement initiatives to proactively monitor the City's commercial corridors to address visual blight and nuisance issues associated with vacant and underutilized properties and non-compliant commercial strips and centers.
ATTACHMENTS:
Resolution Amending Fee Schedule to Add a Fee for the Impoundment of an Abandoned Shopping Cart