The Stonecrest City Council on June 26 approved an ordinance addressing abandoned shopping carts, requiring new businesses to provide cart-retrieval plans and imposing fines for businesses that fail to comply.

The ordinance (TMOD 25-001) was presented by city staff as a public-safety and nuisance measure to address shopping carts removed from business premises and left on public or private property. The ordinance creates a retrieval-plan requirement for new developments, defines abandoned shopping carts, and establishes citations and penalties. Under the ordinance as amended by council, the citation amount is $150 for the first cart and $125 for each additional cart from the same business, with a maximum fine not to exceed $500 for a single enforcement event.

Council discussion focused on legal and procedural distinctions between a city “fee” and a “fine.” Several council members and the city attorney advised that fines tied to citations give businesses due-process rights through municipal adjudication, whereas a separate fee schedule (which would require a 45‑day public posting) would be needed only if the city intended to perform cart retrieval as a charged service. After debate, the council amended ordinance language to replace references to “fees” with “fines” and removed language requiring the city fee schedule update, which staff said would make the ordinance enforceable without publishing a separate fee schedule.

Code enforcement described the intended enforcement sequence: initial contact with the merchant or point of contact, a 72‑hour period for removal of carts (during which the merchant may present or submit a retrieval plan), and then citation if the carts are not removed. The ordinance also contains a separate requirement that businesses must supply a retrieval plan to the city within 24 hours when specifically requested; councilors discussed whether to align the two timeframes but ultimately left the 24‑hour plan-submission language in place with the clarified enforcement approach.

City legal counsel said the ordinance could move forward that night if the language distinguishing fines from fees was fixed. Councilman Terry Fye, the ordinance sponsor, moved to adopt TMOD 25-001 with the stated changes; the motion carried 5–0.

Council directed staff to make the wording clearer in enforcement subsections and to confirm final ordinance language before implementation. Staff said they expect code enforcement to administer the new rules and assess fines under the municipal process rather than collect a service fee for cart retrieval.