New Fortuna ordinance focused on abandoned shopping cart

The city of Fortuna calls itself “The Friendly City”. But when it comes to abandoned shopping carts – that’s where the friendliness ends.

“Our problem ordinance policing team over the last year they do – as some of their tasking, they do clean-ups, and we had been running into a real uptick in over the last year of abandoned shopping carts that were located on public and private property,” Fortuna Police Department Chief Casey Day said. 

With the ordnance, the city of Fortuna is making sure that merchants take responsibility to ensure that these carts don’t go abandoned.

The Fortuna City Council adopted the statute last month.

It states “the purpose and intent of this ordinance is promote public health, safety and welfare of its residents, visitors and businesses.”

“We were finding these carts were impeding sidewalks or just in sidewalks, or in the road or near a driveway,” Chief Day said. “If the problem isn’t addressed, it can really impact the vehicular and pedestrian thoroughfare.”

We set out to find just how many carts were abandoned today in Fortuna. After 90 minutes, we found none.

As for the ordinance, the chief says this is part of the city’s beautification efforts and to keep property values from falling.

“We want to reduce landfill trash, by having a certain set of structural rules where we work together collaboratively with the businesses to get their property returned and really, that’s the end goal,” Chief Day said.