The Emporia Gazette

October 6, 2008

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Photo by Jordan Haiduk

Abandoned shopping carts from Price Chopper lie tangled in greenery in a ditch near the store.

Sometimes, Price Chopper gets its shopping carts back. Sometimes, the carts become avant-garde ditch art.

For years now, the grocer at 2703 W. Highway 50 has been making special trips off its property both to serve customers and to save itself some money. Residents of West Hill Mobile Home Park, the trailer park south of Price Chopper across Sixth Avenue, have been walking to the store, then taking shopping carts back to their homes to unload their groceries. Once they’re done with the carts, some shoppers leave them outside their trailer homes — and Price Chopper employees make runs to the trailer park, every few weeks or so, to pick them up.

But some of the carts, worth between $150 and $300 new, get dumped in the drainage canal separating the Price Chopper property from the old Big Lots property to the west. The canal is something of a hidden eyesore, because the carts and various other forms of trash are obscured by the overgrown plant life filling the drainage ditch. Upon close inspection of the ditch, you’ll find not only junked shopping carts, but also such items as an ironing board and a rusty park-type railing.

With bushes, trees and trash all in abundance, it might be asked why the city doesn’t take steps to clean up the ditch. One Emporia resident who asked not to be identified complained to The Gazette about the trash and vegetation.

But the canal itself is private property, which is part of why former Price Chopper owner Arnie Graham’s effort to prompt the city to get it cleaned up essentially went nowhere. Graham, who still owns the property on which Price Chopper sits, talked to the city about it when Steve Commons was still city manager.

According to an overhead city property-line map, which current City Manager Matt Zimmerman noted was not survey-accurate, the ditch forms the east end of the property line for Big Lots. The property is managed by developer D.J. Christie Inc. and owned by Diversified Acquisitions, a Kansas City-area company, according to John Nolan, D.J. Christie Director of Sales and Leasing.

Commons recalled that the city had conversations about keeping the canal clean with Big Lots employees, rather than the owner of the property. A city improvement, he said, “just wasn’t economically feasible for the city. An open ditch like that is the most cost-effective, and the city didn’t, and still doesn’t, I assume, have lots of money sitting around to do drainage improvements.”

That’s still the case, according to Zimmerman.

“In my time here, no one has ever approached me about maintaining that, either from a vegetation or from a garbage standpoint,” he said. “Typically, the city does not go onto private property and maintain that.

“We’ve had a number of calls just this year alone about drainage issues all over town. And this is more garbage than drainage, I understand, but it’s the same theory that if we’re gonna go in and start re-grading and maintaining the detention areas, other than designated public detention areas, that the city can’t afford that without a significant tax increase. ... So we’re certainly not looking to add more programs, add more without a designated revenue source of some kind.”

Zimmerman said he didn’t know if the vegetation in the ditch was potentially a violation of a city ordinance.

“We have the 12-inch weed regulations,” he said. “... As a vegetation (issue), tree vs. grassy, I don’t know, and the fact that it’s in a designated waterway, I don’t know how that affects it. At least in my time, we’ve never really received a complaint about it, so we haven’t ever really dealt with it.”

The cart runs to West Hill and the occasional lost carts have become a long-standing fact of life for Price Chopper. It’s been that way throughout manager Shawn Kelley’s 16 years at the store. Each run usually results in three to four retrieved carts, some of which are taken back in unusable condition.

“It’s a pain to go pick ’em up and everything,” he said. “But it’s just something we’ve always done, so it is what it is, I guess.”

Kelley said Price Chopper has made no effort to get reimbursed for the carts that are lost or retrieved in unusable condition.

“I don’t even really know how we would go about it,” he said. “I mean, if you see your property sitting in somebody else’s lawn, I’m sure we could do something. We just don’t.”

Nolan was amused to hear about Price Chopper’s shopping cart situation. Nolan said Diversified Acquisitions has owned the building for about four years, and he just got the property listed for them. He said this was the first he had heard of the ditch’s trash problem.

“I have seen it ... it is overgrown,” Nolan said. “I haven’t seen all that (trash) down there.”

Nolan said he would let officials with Diversified Acquisitions know about the problem. Graham, who now lives in Snowmass Village, Colo., and officials from Diversified Acquisitions couldn’t be reached.

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