The College Station city council is giving store operators a chance to retrieve abandoned shopping carts without paying registration fees and fines.
The council at its last meeting agreed to some new requirements presented by community services director Debbie Eller.
The council directed staff to write an ordinance requiring stores to tell the city who can be contacted when code enforcement finds shopping carts off store property.
Eller says code enforcement and sanitation currently dispose of carts…which are valued between $300 and $600 dollars each.
Eller says she recently met with the managers of five stores, and none are willing to prosecute anyone caught stealing a shopping cart because that is how some customers get their purchases home.
The council also agreed to require stores to look for carts within one or two miles of their location every seven days and develop a plan to prevent carts from leaving store property.
Councilmen James Benham and John Nichols were among the supporters of what they hope is the first and only phase of city regulations, suggesting they could be as severe as the College Station’s regulations when the yellow OFO rental bicycles are abandoned off the Texas A&M campus.
