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YUBA CITY-

It’s a problem Yuba City’s been facing street corner by downtown street corner for months – shopping carts miles away from their big box retailer of origin.

“The carts seem to migrate down into the area and one no reclaims them.  No one picks them up. They seem to congregate together and have a little family reunion together,” Darin Gale, Yuba City’s economic development manager and spokesman, said Monday

City employees expected to find about 200 abandoned carts through the first part of their  “Clean and Safe” campaign, but their estimates didn’t come close.

“Started at 8 (a.m.), ended at 11 (p.m.). (We) found 453 carts within that time frame,” he said.

The discoveries were a regular Sunday circular of the usual suspects – Big Lots, Kmart, Grocery Outlet, Ross.

Walmart had the most found carts of all retailers with 72.

It’s one of the companies that doesn’t contract with a retrieval service to regularly sweep the city for its carts.

Watching buggies disappear with thoughtless shoppers and the homeless is hard for the folks at Goodwill of Yuba City.

“It’s pretty frustrating…work hard here to make our money to buy those things and people just take off with them,” said Goodwill manager Dan Munsee.

Goodwill has lost at least ten carts over the last five months and will be getting four back thanks to this round-up.

They can cost upward of $100 apiece.

While this effort will save retailers some money, it may also buy Yuba City a brighter future.

“Although we have high unemployment, we don’t have the high crime rates that go along with it. And we don’t want to see blight on our neighborhoods,” said Gale.

After a sweep like this, state law does allow cities to charge retailers $50 a day for cart storage 72-hours past collection.

Gale says Yuba City’s council isn’t interested in exercising that option, but members are considering a mandatory retrieval service ordinance.

Now that some stores have claimed their lost property from the city’s Corporation Yard, about 200 carts remain.

Retailers will be getting letters from the city, alerting them about the found carts and letting them know they have 45 days to pick them up.