By Richard Caines

SALISBURY — City officials are cracking down on abandoned shopping carts.

But City Council changed the way the amended ordinance is enforced after hearing concern from some, including the Maryland Retailers Alliance.

Under the amended ordinance that passed unanimously July 22, business owners are required to post cart removal warning signs and nameplates on the carts identifying their stores.

An establishment could also send a letter to any customer who uses a cart off-site to bring it back within 72 hours.

The city said the measure is needed because abandoned shopping carts are a “nuisance,” create “potential hazards to the health and safety of the public and interfere with pedestrian and vehicular traffic.”

“The accumulation of wrecked, dismantled and abandoned shopping carts on public and private property creates conditions that reduce property values and promote blight and neighborhood deteriorations within the city,” the amended ordinance states.

But some retailers like Aldi will not be penalized like they would have been under a prior proposal that was tabled.

Housing and community development director Muir Boda said during a June work session that code compliance officers would immediately remove abandoned shopping carts and place them into city storage. When they collect 10 shopping carts for one business, they will take them back with a fine of $25 per cart.

“We hope that this would encourage businesses with shopping carts to either develop processes to reduce the number of carts leaving their property or become proactive in picking up their carts around the city,” Boda wrote in a letter to the council.

But the Maryland Retailers Alliance wrote in a previous letter to the city that it is concerned with the proposed ordinance and that it supports the development of a system that allows retailers to provide contact information to the city so that businesses can work together with the community to collect carts before a fine is issued.

Additionally, the alliance wrote that the proposed ordinance would not give retailers time to collect the carts from the city’s storage lot or the carts’ abandoned locations before they would be fined.

After hearing the concern, city staff added language to the amended ordinance before its passing that for “each lost, stolen or abandoned shopping cart impounded by the city, the city shall issue a $25 fine to the cart owner, unless the cart owner can demonstrate it took adequate procedures to prevent cart abandonment, loss or theft as determined by the city director or his or her designee.”

Council President D’Shawn Doughty said during a July 8 meeting that the prior proposal would have penalized businesses that already had measures in place to deter shopping carts from being removed.

For example, Aldi uses a system in which a customer must unlock a cart by sticking a quarter into a slot. Once a cart is returned to the cart area and locked back in place, the coin used to unlock the cart is returned to the customer.

The amended ordinance went into effect immediately.

Sarah Price, on behalf of the Maryland Retailers Alliance, thanked council for hearing the organization’s concern.

“I learned just today, actually, that the lead time on ordering shopping carts for a retailer is at least six months, if not longer, so everyone would love to be able to keep their carts on their property, if at all possible,” she said.