Hickory wants charities to remove drop-boxes

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City may ban them outright

By Jesse Marx

Hickory Hills has had a long-standing problem with the charitable donation boxes that consume public and private parking spaces and last Thursday decided to do something about them.

The city will send letters to property owners, requesting that they ask the owners of the containers to have the boxes removed.

Without notice and without permission, the boxes have proliferated over the years, sometimes showing up four-fold at a single location.

“They’re not legal and they’re not wanted,” said Mayor Mike Howley. “They are in the sightline of some of our main thoroughfares. You drive down 95th Street and you look left and you look right and you’re bound to see one of these ... whether there’s garbage or debris hanging out of them.”

Donors drop bags when the boxes are filled to capacity, and the bags containing items tend to open, allowing debris to blow across parking lots, Howley explained.

The boxes are also illegal. They take up parking spaces that are required per square foot of every building, said Alderman Mike McHugh (1st Ward), the City Council’s Facilities Committee chairman.

If the containers’ owners do not remove the drop boxes, the city will ask its attorney to draft an ordinance officially banishing the containers. If the charitable organizations merely move their containers onto the grass, Hickory Hills attorney Vince Cainkar said the city will “worry about it then.”

The City Council is refusing to pick and choose between charitable and commercial organizations.

“It’s the same problem regardless of who owns them,” Cainkar clarified.

Cainkar estimated there are 25 donation boxes in the city. The former CP Auto property, 8701 S. Kean Ave., which was given to the city to clean up, has three charitable boxes. A fourth was moved by the charity to a gas station on 87th Avenue.

Some of the charitable containers, including one at Standard Bank, 7725 W. 98th St., have been there for years, but others have sprung up overnight.

Palos Heights in May banned charitable boxes in front of all commercial and private buildings. The city noted at the time that there are still plenty of places to donate clothes and household items, including drop boxes inside churches.

“Every other town gets rid of them,” Cainkar said. “That’s why [we] have so many. They move them over here.”

This is part of the July 29, 2010 online edition of The Reporter.

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