Stephen Gianotti, a courtesy clerk at Newport Avenue Market, returns a shopping cart to the store after helping a customer to her car on Friday.

Every once in a while, Spike Bement will drive through the neighborhoods surrounding Newport Avenue Market, where he is the store manager, searching for lost shopping carts. Bement doesn’t know how often he makes the rounds, but he says it’s the nature of having a neighborhood grocery store.

”Sometimes I can just tell by the fleet (of carts) that some are missing,” Bement said, adding that abandoned carts usually end up in alleys or streets or find their way back to the store. ”We have four Safeway (carts) in the back of the store right now,” he said last week.

Averaging about $200 each, Central Oregon retailers don’t take lost shopping carts lightly.

Some stores have deterrents against cart theft, including a sensory system that locks the cart’s wheels if it moves past a designated area. But those types of systems aren’t 100 percent effective, says Dan Floyd, vice president of political affairs for the Wilsonville-based Northwest Grocery Association.

To deal with the problem, the association proposed Senate Bill 645 in the Oregon Legislature to curb shopping cart theft and create a system of reporting abandoned carts and returning them to retailers.

”Our retailers identified this as a problem in a number of (areas),” Floyd said. ”We want to get these back to retailers because they are a valuable asset, an eyesore and a hazard in the neighborhoods.”

Shopping carts typically cost $100 to $300 to replace, Floyd said, and 3,500 carts per week are removed from retailers in Portland and Salem, most of which are retrieved.

The shopping cart legislation would not be mandatory for all Oregon cities, Floyd added, because some cities may not have a problem. If passed, Central Oregon cities would decide whether to adopt the measure.

The bill had no opposition during a recent Senate hearing, Floyd said, and will move off the Senate floor in the next week or so. Then, it must go through the House of Representatives and receive the governor’s signature before it would take effect Jan. 1, 2008.

Bend currently has no ordinance for the reporting and retrieval of shopping carts, said Steve Esselstyn, community liaison for the Bend Police Department.

Basics of the bill:

* Retailers that supply shopping carts must post signs that taking a shopping cart off the business premises is a crime (stealing).

* Retailers must provide a toll-free telephone number through which residents can report a misplaced cart. The process of reporting an abandoned cart may be available through a Web site, Floyd added.

* Retailers must put their name on all carts, post a sign on the carts that says taking a cart from the premises is a crime and include a toll-free number for retrieval.

* If the local government chooses to take custody of an abandoned cart, it can impose a $50 fine on the cart’s owner if it’s not retrieved within 72 hours.

Regardless of the bill passing, Floyd said the Northwest Grocery Association will fund the 1-800 number and a cart-retrieval service for its members in the Portland-Salem area. The purpose of a state bill is to create a uniform program for reporting and retrieving carts, he added.

”We know from our numbers that there is a problem in Portland and Salem,” Floyd said. ”I would assume that an area like Bend is where we would (push for an ordinance) next.”

But not all grocery store chains support the bill, including Albertsons, says the company’s communications manager, Donna Eggers. Cart losses aren’t a serious problem, she said.

A number of other Central Oregon grocery stores agree that a city ordinance regarding carts may not be needed.

”I’ve been here six years and for us, it’s not a problem,” said John Slivkoff, store manager of Ray’s Food Place on Southwest Century Drive. ”But I’ve had that situation when I worked in California, and we lost 20 per week.”

Representatives from Eriksons Thriftway and Food 4 Less also said shopping cart theft wasn’t a major problem.

Floyd said neighborhood associations have supported the bill, acknowledging that the carts are a nuisance for residents.

At Newport Avenue Market, shopper Dean Klivans said she sees various abandoned shopping carts around Bend and wouldn’t mind calling them in if a toll-free number were posted for that purpose.

”Bend is (so) clean, I’d like to keep it that way,” Klivans said. ”You see that people seem to really care about the city.”

On the Web

To read the bill, visit www.leg.state.or.us/07 reg/measpdf/sb0600.dir/ sb0645.1sa.pdf