When Bill Plummer drives along Boyd Street during his morning commute, something unsightly often catches his eye.
Shopping carts stuck in ditches, abandoned on the side of the road, and left under the Queensborough Bridge are damaging the look of his community, he said.
“Port Royal is kind of an aspiring neighbourhood,” he told the Record. “If, on the way there, you see all these overturned shopping carts, it just looks unsightly.”
Plummer has been seeing overturned shopping carts abandoned along Boyd Street and under and around the Queensborough Bridge for around two years.
This week, he found five carts near the northbound bus stop at the on-ramp to the bridge. More were abandoned near the ICBC Lower Mainland Salvage lot, but have since been picked up. Others he’s recently found lying in ditches.
He started reporting them on New West’s SeeClickFix app back in March, but some he reported have still not been removed.
For Plummer, the abandoned shopping carts are part of a larger problem. While he’s seen improvements to the Port Royal neighbourhood in recent years, he feels like his neighbourhood has been neglected, he said.
“As far as city works are concerned, I think a lot of Queensborough residents feel like they are left behind,” he said. “Queensborough’s been kind of the black sheep of the New Westminster, Queensborough relationship for a long time.
“Even though we are equal rate-payers … it sounds like the residents of Queensborough (don’t) equal residents of the city, it feels like.”
But Jonathan Marcone, supervisor of parks and open space maintenance for the City of New Westminster, said he sends an employee to investigate all the reports of abandoned carts. It’s not always as simple as just sending someone to pick them up, he said.
Queensborough’s ditches can be very deep, so the city needs to use machinery to pull them out, machines that are likely already being used for other tasks in the city during the busy summer months.
Coun. Patrick Johnstone said he hadn’t heard about carts being left in ditches, but he knows the engineering department promptly responds to complaints.
“I think illegal dumping is an issue that happens around the region,” he said. “We try to address it as quickly as we can.”
Plummer would like the city to go a step further. He suggested the city create a bylaw requiring stores to use shopping carts that prevent theft, such as carts that lock wheels when they’re removed from the property. He’d also like to see more done to address the larger issue of illegal dumping in the community.
“Until then, I guess the city is just going to waste resources picking up these carts, or not picking up these carts. And then it creates this eyesore,” he said.
