Proliferation of donation bins leads to city regulations

The proliferation of donation boxes in parking lots around the West Valley has caused residents to complain and some cities to call for limits on where the boxes can be placed and better identification of who is operating them.

Surprise is the latest West Valley city after Peoria and Goodyear to regulate donation bins that sometimes appear in shopping centers or strip mall parking lots without permission from property owners.

Surprise and Peoria recently passed ordinances that require donation-bin owners to obtain temporary-use permits and to print the permit numbers in 2-inch letters on the front of the bin to help with enforcement. There are other requirements that donation-bin owners now must follow, such as listing the owner's legitimate telephone number on the bin.

Phoenix also has donation-box regulations, and the Glendale City Council has begun talking about regulating donation bins. Goodyear adopted its donation-bin regulations several years ago, and the ordinance requires box owners to get a zoning permit from the Community Development Department. Gilbert also requires a permit.

Donation bins are boxes used to collect items such as clothes, books and toys for charitable and for-profit uses such as recycling. They are typically found in parking areas of commercial centers and churches.

Hobart Wingard, a Surprise city planner, said the city began receiving increasing complaints from residents about the donation boxes.

"As soon as you get notified about something, you start seeing it a lot more," Wingard said. "So we went out and did an inventory and found we had quite a few of these, and since then, these have grown quite a bit. I believe we had about 65 of these, and I'm sure it is well past that number now. These things seem to sprout like mushrooms."

Peoria passed an ordinance on April 7, and Surprise approved an almost identical ordinance on April 21.

Chris Jacques, Peoria director of planning and community development, said the city's ordinance seeks to manage the growing number of bins.

"It's an ordinance that's trying to create reasonable standards, and ... it was never intended to chase the industry away," Jacques said. "It was never intended to pick for-profits over non-profits."

Some donation boxes are operated by non-profit organizations, while others are operated by for-profit companies. Peoria will charge for-profit companies $100 and non-profits $10 for temporary-use permits.

A concentration of bins in one area sometimes leads to dumping around the boxes, Jacques said.

Surprise and Peoria want to keep the bins out of rights of way, pedestrian corridors, fire lanes and empty lots.

As Peoria staff researched the issue, they noticed some of the telephone numbers on the boxes went to voice mail or weren't real numbers.

"We want to make sure we have a local contact that is responsive to an issue that might arise," Jacques said.

In Glendale, some City Council members are in favor of regulating donation bins. Mayor Jerry Weiers, however, said he is not convinced more regulation is the answer.

"What I don't want to do is create a situation where the good players are all of a sudden paying higher fees than they normally have been paying," Weiers said. "The cost of doing business is high for the charities, the places that make their money from people donating."

Requirements of Peoria and Surprise ordinances include:

•Limiting the number of bins based on the size of the site. One acre or less can have one bin. One to three acres can have two bins, and anything larger than three acres can have up to four bins on the property. They must be on pavement, and no more than two bins can be placed together.

•Requiring annual temporary-use permits for each bin. Each permit renewal requires a new temporary-use permit application and fee. Bin owners must get notarized permission from property owners to place the bins on their property. Surprise hasn't determined a cost for a temporary-use permit yet, but it is considering a range from $20 to $60.

•Ensuring each bin's lid is firmly closed, and the bin must be marked to identify the items and materials that are collected. Donated items in bins must be collected every week. Items dropped outside the boxes must be removed within 24 hours of notification.

•Requiring that vandalized or damaged containers be removed within five business days of notification by the city.

Jason Morris, a partner of Withey Morris, which represents Goodwill of Central Arizona, said Goodwill, which does not use donation bins, supports regulation.

Morris said Goodwill is concerned about the bins because it frequently is blamed for boxes that mimic the Goodwill blue color.

One of the problems is that many people donate believing the boxes belong to local non-profits, which is often not the case, he said.

"These are for-profit entities," he said. "They're often more likely to be out-of-state entities or sometimes international entities, that use local charities to lure donations. But more often than not ... the local (charities) are getting very, very little of the proceeds from these drop boxes. Similarly, people oftentimes think that these are tax-deductible donations they're making, when in fact they're not."

Morris said that there are 8,000 to 10,000 donation bins around the Valley. He added that the company is not trying to prevent the donation bins and that they do not take donations away from Goodwill.

Kristin Greene, a vice president at Molera Alvarez, a government relations firm representing American Textile Recycling Service, disputes the number of donation bins around the Valley. She said American Textile Recycling Service, a for-profit company, has the most boxes in the Valley and 537 bins statewide.

American Textile Recycling Service collects clothing, shoes, toys and household items and supports the regulations Surprise and Peoria adopted.

"We think regulation is important, because we are, in fact, a legitimate business, and all legitimate businesses have some form of regulation," Greene said. "Unfortunately, we're being painted with the brush of all those folks in our industry, (whose bins) are blighted, and they're not maintained."