Since June, Albany has had an ordinance intended to stem the plague of stolen shopping carts being dumped all over town. So far, alas, it hasn't worked. The problem is still there.

The city ordinance requires stores to mark their shopping carts with a phone number that people can call in order to have an abandoned cart picked up.

But the carts in circulation out there, among the people who use them to haul about their belongings before dumping them somewhere, likely were purloined long before this measure took effect and could be carried out.

The ones checked by the Democrat-Herald lately bore no numbers and no indication of which company had once owned them.

Shopping carts lying around are not the biggest problem the mid-valley has, obviously. Still, wherever they are dumped they signal a certain degree of decay and neglect.

So the parks maintenance people will have to keep picking them up when they come across them, hoping that the city's new law on the subject will make a difference soon. (hh)