Clamping down on both the proliferation of shopping carts around the City and the wave of bike thefts are behind two Notices of Motion introduced to City council this week.

Coun. Buck Buchanan introduced the Notices of Motion during this week’s regular meeting, and they will be further discussed by council Oct. 3rd.

“This first one was in regards to the bike issue,” said Buchanan.

“It’s looking at the licensing and the registry, because so many of them are getting stolen now,” he said.

”The ones that go into the wind – the serial number is gone, the frame gets painted – so what was your bike doesn’t remotely resemble your bike anymore.

“It would be similar to the stickers you put on your license plate,” he said, adding that a system like this would help ensure bikes are in the correct hands.

As to the shopping carts, Buchanan said his concern is that many are found off-premises and have a tendency to be used as storage spaces for some of the City’s less fortunate citizens.

“That’s a little bit more of a controversial one in that it looks like it’s directly at folks who are homeless,” he said of that particular motion.

But Buchanan said that a lack of housing is the overriding issue, and that both issues – the stealing of bikes and the proliferation of shopping carts – are getting a bit out of control.

He said that during annual clean-ups of the Red Deer River, carts are consistently pulled out amongst the garbage that is gathered as well.

Buchanan would like to see a system in place where the carts cannot leave a shopping centre’s property, for example.

“They are almost $400 a piece – most of them,” he said. “Because they are used the way they are being used, they are all over the place,” he said.

“We’ve got to figure this out.”