Rebuttal: Federal Way mayor says retailers were informed of cart fee

On Monday, Joe Gilliam, the president of the Northwest Grocery Association, told the Dori Monson Show that the City of Federal Way has started imposing a fee for grocery stores to get their carts back after they are found elsewhere in the city. But Federal Way’s mayor disputes how the issue has be characterized.

Federal Way has imposed its new $25 fee on each cart found along its streets, away from the grocery stores they came from. Stores must pay the fee to get the carts back. The Northwest Grocery Association says that stores were surprised by the new fee. Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell maintains that the city did in fact inform all grocery stores of the proposed fee for shopping carts, however.

“We reached out to all the local grocers and retailers, and told them that we were contemplating doing this,” he told David Boze, who was filling in for Dori Monson on Wednesday. “And we had two public meetings.”

Gilliam had said that the fines represent 25 percent of the cost of the carts to begin with, representing a difficulty for grocery stores that are already struggling due to a spike in shoplifting.

RELATED: Renton charging owners $100 to get stolen shopping carts back

According to Ferrell, in recent years, the number of shopping carts abandoned in Federal Way each year has grown from 1,200 to 2,000 carts. Retired police officers used to remove and return the carts as an act of community service, the mayor said, but as these volunteers have gotten too old to keep performing this task, the city is now forced to pay to have the carts collected.

“We have been giving these back to the retailers for years, at probably a benefit to their bottom line of millions of dollars every year, because we’ve been going out on our own dime and picking up these carts and bringing them back,” he said. “We can’t afford to do this anymore.”

He added that other local cities such as Renton and Auburn charge stores higher fees — around $100 — to get carts back.

Ferrell, who worked as a criminal prosecutor for 25 years, compared it to a driver’s car being impounded after leaving it in a no-parking zone, or after the car being stolen.

“Wait a second — if your car is stolen, you have to pay an impound fee?” Boze asked. “If your car is the one stolen, if it’s no fault of your own?”

“I’m not sure how different jurisdictions handle that,” Ferrell replied.

Boze pressed him, wondering why the shopping cart thieves are not stopped before they can ever steal the the carts in the first place. Boze stressed that “the people that are dragging them off don’t own the cart, it’s a piece of stolen property, and there’s nobody going out to enforce it and say, ‘Hey look, this cart does not belong to you.'”

“Who are you going to prosecute when these things, in the hundreds, are abandoned and found in the woods?” Ferrell countered. “Do you really want the cities pulling over, arresting somebody pushing a shopping cart? What are they going to do, strap the cart to the top of the police car?”

Ferrell suggested that grocery stores invest in technology that would stop shopping carts from leaving the premises.

“You can’t prosecute your way out of this … That’s really a false answer to try to claim that we could prosecute our way out of this,” Ferrell said.

He noted that Federal Way conducts sweeps of homeless encampments regularly and is strict about not allowing public camping.

Boze commended the City of Federal Way for cleaning up encampments, but called it “grotesquely unfair to fine businesses for having their property stolen,” and suggested that the city and stores come up with a compromise.

Ferrell insisted that it is the retailers’ job to keep the carts from being stolen.

“They’ve got a responsibility to make sure that their property doesn’t get littered all over our community,” Ferrell countered.