Stores should at least be consulted about cart ordinance
Stores should at least be consulted about cart ordinance
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We find it interesting that what seemed at first to be a pretty stringent shopping cart ordinance is likely to be watered down.
Crystal Surdyk, city development director, said the concerns of advocates for the homeless have been heard, with the ordinance to be changed before approval to make sure people will not be losing all of their possessions with this ordinance.
“There’s already some things that we’ve seen that we want to change,” Surdyk said. “I want to be really, really clear on where this is coming from, because I think there’s been some concern and I want to address that concern that it is going to negatively affect our homeless population, and we acknowledge that that’s a possibility and there are some solutions that we’ve got to come up with to not add another barrier or obstacle to those individuals.”
But it's not a problem to increase barriers to business? Therein lies the rub with this proposal, as we noted a couple of weeks ago. Let's not forget that stores are a driver of two of the city's biggest sources of property and sales tax revenue in a city that is looking to increase taxes by 7.4% this year. Hurting ancillary sources of tax revenue – even in small ways – is something that should be considered. We find it funny that, a few weeks after the ordinance was initially proposed to the council, changes are coming to protect the homeless yet even stores with local ownership apparently haven't yet been consulted nor have local managers been consulted to begin sending the proposal up the corporate chain of command. We aren't saying the city shouldn't tailor the law to protect the homeless, but this is a law that was quite punitive to stores with fines for non-compliance and costs to be paid to comply in the first place, yet the people that will bear the costs for other people's malfeasance aren't being consulted at all. That's a very New York state way of doing business – and we think the city should do things differently than New York state.
Urban mining is, and will continue to be, a problem as long as there are unsecured vacant homes with scrap metal in them. Shopping carts filled with scrap metal and stolen items are a symptom of the root problems of high poverty and unsecured vacant homes – yet we want to carve out protections for the homeless at the expense of businesses that help pay the city's bills without as much as a courtesy call.
Stores need to be part of the solution to keep shopping carts out of the wrong hands – a sentence that seems ludicrous simply typing it, by the way. They should be consulted before this resolution goes to the council. After all, shopping carts are expensive, and a lot of stores that once had an entry way filled with carts have a lot fewer now. Store owners certainly want to end the theft of their store property. We're sure they have some ideas – and they should receive as much consideration as the homeless as the city drafts this ordinance.