Red Deer city councillor Buck Buchanan wants to reduce bike thefts in the city as well as the proliferation of stolen shopping carts used by homeless people.
Buchanan introduced two Notices of Motion at Monday’s council meeting, asking that anti-theft initiatives be discussed by council at the next meeting on Oct. 1.
Red Deer is seeing more stray shopping carts: They “are littering the city,” said Buchanan, who proposes council “engage with retailers” to find solutions to prevent shopping carts from leaving commercial properties and ending up “where they don’t belong.”
This includes the Red Deer River — as well as city streets, where homeless people use them to carry their belongings, said Buchanan.
He wants city administration to look at adding a “shopping cart protocol” into the Community Standards Bylaw.
He also wants city staff to work with social service agencies to come up with more housing solutions, as well as alternatives “that better respond to our collective efforts to address homelessness and social problems in our community.”
The councillor agreed his proposal is similar to a shopping cart ban on public property that the City of Vernon, B.C. looked at adopting — and then abandoned after homeless advocates called it a heavy-handed response that treads on people’s rights and freedoms.
Buchanan noted shopping carts are essentially stolen property. He said the ‘rights and freedoms’ argument can be debated from the opposite perspective, so “let’s try to figure something out.”
Buchanan has heard of thieves, with bolt cutters in their backpack, taking bikes apart to sell their parts or trade them for drugs. He therefore also proposes starting a local bicycle registration and licensing bylaw.
Other cities require bike owners to register their bike’s serial numbers as an anti-theft measure, added Buchanan, who wants the city to work with the Central Alberta Crime Prevention Centre to start an online local bike registration program that’s cost-effective for bike owners (including offering family rates).
His Notice of Motion states that more than 113 bikes were reported in the city so far this year and 112 were reported stolen in 2017. Since the actual number of bikes that were found so far in 2018 number 190, while 327 were found last year — this indicates that many people have given up on reporting their bikes stolen.
Buchanan also wants a local bylaw that allows peace officers to crack down on those with rebuilt bikes that are not registered or which have had their serial numbers scraped off.
The councillor looks forward to starting a conversation on these issues, noting city residents have put dealing with property crimes at the top of the city’s to-do list.