One Bay Area city tried an innovative program to deal with its abandoned shopping cart problem. Here’s what happened.

Earlier this year, San Jose politicians announced they were targeting the thousands of abandoned shopping carts clogging creeks and blighting streets. Now the first data on a pilot program aimed at curbing the problem is in, and the city must decide whether the results justify the financial cost of expanding it.

San Jose had long struggled to rein in the abandoned shopping cart problem, due in part to antiquated state rules and ineffective city code. Its multi-pronged strategy this year included stricter local regulations for large retailers, requiring them either to install theft-prevention mechanisms or security deposit devices, or to enter into a cart-retrieval contract that obligates the company to make weekly, proactive efforts to pick up their carts.

The city also successfully pushed a statewide bill to allow governments to return carts directly to retailers and recover the costs of retrieval.

Its most innovative effort was testing a cart retrieval program in two parts of the city, which collected 734 carts over three months.

“The thousands of carts that are lost every year and scattered across sidewalks, parks, our trails and waterways are not just a visible quality of life issue for our residents, not just an eyesore, but they actually really damage the environment,” Mayor Matt Mahan said last week. “I can tell you every single cleanup along the waterways we do, we’re fishing dozens of carts out, so I appreciate that we’re looking to find a measured, targeted program that’s got cost recovery baked in, that holds retailers accountable, incentivizes them for upstream loss prevention, keeping our neighborhoods and waterways clean.”

Before Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Sen. Dave Cortese’s bill, the state required a three-day window for retailers to pick up their carts without charge, which San Jose officials said inhibited its ability to recover costs. It also required local governments to impound carts for up to 30 days before they could sell or dispose of them and capped fines for retailers at $50 per cart each time they retrieved more than three carts over a six-month period.

The new legislation increased the penalty to $100 for each occurrence.

Locally, San Jose added more stringent regulations for retailers with at least 76 carts. Previously, the city had required retailers with at least 26 carts to submit an annual plan for retrieving and retaining their carts, including the loss prevention measures they intended to deploy.

City officials also greenlit a pilot similar to an existing Milpitas program, which uses a third-party service to collect abandoned carts.

San Jose contracted with the firm carTrac for $32,000 to monitor two areas. The first area ran south of the airport down to Tully Road, bounded to the east by Highway 101. The second area is centered around the intersection of Blossom Hill Road and Almaden Expressway.

While the program reported collecting carts from 50 retailers, 622 of the 734 carts came from 10 businesses, including many big-box stores. During the first 10 weeks, Costco accounted for 204 carts, followed by 137 from Whole Foods and another 108 from Walmart.

Rachel Roberts, deputy director of code enforcement, added that the city’s decision to test the program diverted resources equivalent to 62 proactive investigations, 10 potential citations, and a review of 30 shopping cart management plans.

The pilot program could be rolled out to other parts of San Jose next year if city officials add it to next year’s budget. It would require approximately $686,000 in startup costs, and — if the city charged a $100 fee for each of the 12,821 carts it estimates it could retrieve — would generate $1.28 million in revenue.

But with the city facing a budget shortfall next year, there are some concerns about adding the new program.

“We have a challenging budget year, next year, and we’re going to be in service preservation mode as a council,” District 8 Councilmember Domingo Candelas said. “I’m a little nervous about investing $700,000 in upfront costs.”

As part of the next steps, Roberts said the city is surveying retailers about the pilot’s success and its impact on their operations. If the city elects to move forward with the program, she added that a request for proposals would need to be completed by June to ensure the service could start in the next fiscal year.

While some questions remain, city officials acknowledged that retailers needed to be held accountable and better custodians of their carts.

“If the retailers can take actions that prevent us from ever needing to hire a third party to go collect carts and then charge them for cost recovery, that would be wonderful,” Mahan said. “I think we need this likely in place to incentivize that behavior, in which case, maybe our costs are significantly lower or closer to cost recovery. But we’ll learn more as we head toward the budget process.”