Glen Cove may fine retailers for stray carts

Stray shopping carts - sidewalk-clogging, trash-inviting eyesores - are fixed firmly in Glen Cove's crosshairs.

City leaders recently met with area grocery and pharmacy chains to request they keep closer watch on their carts or face hefty fines. Public works employees say they retrieve about 60 carts a week from medians and residential neighborhoods and take them to city storage.

"I'm tired of wasting manpower," Mayor Ralph Suozzi said last week.

Current Glen Cove code allows companies to reclaim carts from the city at no cost. Existing penalties are aimed at customers: $250 for taking a rolling basket "beyond the premises of the owner."

But Suozzi said he's not interested in penalizing people with no other option for getting groceries home. If stores operating in the city - including Stop & Shop, King Kullen and CVS - don't improve their own collection efforts, Glen Cove will consider rewriting its ordinance to charge retailers $250 per reclaimed cart, he said.

Under that proposal, a store that picks up 20 carts a week would pay the city $20,000 a month in retrieval fees. Another option the city has studied would require stores to install an electronic barrier on the perimeter of their properties that causes cart wheels to lock when they attempt to pass.

"If they can't step up to the plate then we'll force them to the plate," Suozzi said last month, before his meeting with several affected retailers. "And money is the way to do it."

After the meeting, the mayor decided to first try a stricter enforcement program that encourages stores to pick up stray carts from the city by the end of the same business day.

"We certainly want to work cooperatively," CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis said. "If we can cooperate without fees being involved, that would be our preference."

Suozzi said rewriting city code is a last resort. He plans on revisiting the issue in three months.

Glen Cove's Beautification Commission Supervisor Damion Stavredes called the errant carts a distraction from his crew's more-concentrated litter removal efforts. "That's more important than us doing someone else's job," he said.

DeAngelis and Amy Murphy, a Stop & Shop spokeswoman, said they were unaware of any municipality enacting fines as high as those proposed by Glen Cove. King Kullen officials could not be reached. A review of town and city codes across Nassau County shows that only one charges more than $5 for carts it gets to first: North Hempstead charges retailers $100.

"It's not common for situations like this to come up," Murphy said. "In general, store shopping carts are very rarely a problem in the suburbs."