San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
S.D. DESTROYS SHOPPING CARTS
Many crushed in trash trucks during homeless encampment cleanups; retrieval firm official wants it to stop
The head of a company hired to retrieve shopping carts for grocers and retail stores has a message to the San Diego city crews who are destroying them.
Please stop.
Matthew Dodson, head of a cartretrieval service with 5,000 clients in California, said retailers likely spend millions of dollars each year to replace lost shopping carts. The thought that some are being deliberately destroyed before his company can retrieve them is particularly frustrating.
Yet that is what has been happening in recent months in downtown San Diego and a few other areas where the city has increased enforcement of laws prohibiting sidewalk homeless encampments. During cleanups, crews toss shopping carts and dismantled bicycles, many just missing a wheel, into a trash truck, where they are crushed and hauled to a landfill.
Alma Rife, supervising public information officer for San Diego, said the city does contact the cart-retrieval service RMS when people report shopping carts in public places through the city’s Get It Done app.
“Cart owners have the option to install theft prevention devices that would eliminate these carts from ending up in canyons, riverbeds or sidewalks,” she said about how stores could do more to protect their carts.
While Rife said the city does attempt to contact RMS, Dodson’s company, he said the messages may not be getting through, and he wants to work with the city to make a better connection.
“I will be reaching out to the city to try to open communications on our side,” Dodson said. “The key to this really is communication, so many of these problems can be resolved by just a conversation and a follow-up to put practices in places.”
City officials originally were asked in mid-july why shopping carts found in homeless encampments were destroyed rather than given back to their owners. The question was referred to RMS, and conversations with city officials on Friday still did not explain why carts were destroyed.
Dodson, who is president of RMS’ cart-retrieval service Cartrac, said he was unaware that the city was destroying shopping carts on site until contacted for a comment about the policy, which he said
makes it extremely difficult for grocers and retailers to get their property back.
Local clients OFRMS include Target, CVS, Sprouts, Food 4 Less, Walmart, Ralphs and almost every grocery store in San Diego County, he said. The company has crews in San Diego, Chula Vista, El Cajon, Fallbrook and Vista.
Dodson said other examples of how cities can work with cart-retrieval services already exist in other cities.
“Glendale has a program in place where they really communicate with grocers so they can get these shopping carts back to be used by customers,” he said. “The city of Los Angeles, particularly the LAPD, has a community policing department where they call us out before they go out, and we work cooperatively with them to be on site when the authorities are there.”
Besides being wasteful, Dodson said destroying shopping carts also is illegal. A section of the California Business and Professions code states cities and counties must notify retailers if shopping carts are impounded, and they must be held 30 days before being discarded or sold.
City officials have not commented about Dodson’s claim about the code violation.
In Oceanside, the cartretrieval service Glide Rite contracts with Home Depot and other stores. Roy Shauli, regional operations manager for Glide Rite, said his company coordinates with the city when doing a weekly round.
“We have great relationships with some law enforcement agencies, code enforcement officers, sanitation departments,” he said about how Glide Rite works in other cities.
“But not in every city,” he said. “I wish that were the case. If it were, it would be a lot better for the community and my customers.”
Dodson also said many cities besides San Diego destroy shopping carts before retrieval services can save them, and he noted that San Francisco is particularly aggressive.
Neither RMS nor Glide Rite retrieve shopping carts for Home Depot in the city of San Diego, although many of the store’s orange carts can often be seen in homeless encampments.
Christina Cornell, communications officer for Home Depot, said the company does not want its shopping carts destroyed.
“We work with cities across the country to retrieve lost or stolen carts, and we’re engaging with city leaders in California to do the same,” she said, in an email from company’s headquarters in Atlanta.
Dobson and Shauli said their crew members approach homeless people with respect and caution when attempting to retrieve a cart, often offering them water or snack when asking for a cart. On a recent afternoon in Clairemont, RMS District Supervisor Christian Ramirez spotted a couple of shopping carts at an encampment on Shawline Street.
“I’d rather ask them if I can take it,” he said, adding that he only takes carts that are empty or have nothing but trash in them. He will not dump out personal possessions, he said.
Ramirez said he retrieves 80 to 100 carts a day, and about 25 percent are from homeless people. In the Shawline encampment, he noticed two carts were being used to tie down a tarp protecting an empty encampment, so he decided to leave them behind.
He changed his mind after Richard Fish approached Ramirez and told him it was OK to take the carts, which he said were being used by his brother at the encampment.
“It’s theirs, so what are you going do?” said Fish, 57.
As he watched Ramirez load the carts into his pickup, Fish admitted he likely would just find another couple of carts to replace them.
During a recent encampment cleanup on Anna Avenue in San Diego, a police officer was asked why carts were being thrown into a trash truck rather than given back to their owners. The officer said stores would not want them after they had been in an encampment.
That didn’t sit well with Shauli.
“That’s really bad to have a police officer say, ‘We’re just going to toss it away, nobody wants this,’ ” he said. “First of all, that’s property of Home Depot.”
Dobson also said stores appreciate the return of their carts, which usually are cleaned and put back into use.
“Even a fairly dirty cart, the cost to clean it is less than $10,” Dodson said, adding that his company also repairs shopping carts that have been damaged.
Shopping carts cost between $150 to $300, and Dodson said his retail clients lose an average of 5 percent to 10 percent of their carts each year.
“It adds up,” he said. Besides shopping carts, bicycle parts found in homeless encampments are also tossed into trash trucks and crushed.
“It’s very concerning to us,” San Diego County Bicycle Coalition Advocacy Director William Rhatigan said about the many bicycle parts that have been destroyed in recent weeks. “A lot of homeless people rely on bikes as their primary transportation.”
Some of the bicycles may have been stolen, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s office said in June that the city is exploring a 90-day impound program to give owners an opportunity to reclaim their property.
Bikes that are not claimed could be donated to a bicycle advocacy group that can do repairs and redistribute them under the plan discussed by the mayor’s office.
Rhatigan said the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition has reached out to the mayor’s office to work with them on the program. More than a month after its announcement, however, the program still has not been created.