City to spend $540,000 to protect residents from their yard carts

Local inventor Kim Brokaw has not been able to sell his “anti-tip plate” to the private sector that he says prevents 95-gallon Yardy yard-waste carts like the ones the city issues from tumbling backward and injuring people.

Thursday night, the City Council signaled it will spend $540,000 from the city's solid-waste-and-recycling operation to buy 54,000 of Brokaw's plastic CartGuards.

Brokaw will charge the city $8 each for the plastic tipping guards, and the city expects it will cost an additional $2 each for the city or a contractor to install the guards.

The consensus of council members took the step to make the purchase without a vote, but with a caveat - they agreed with council member Kris Gulick's suggestion that the city see if it can retrieve money from Brokaw down the road in return for being his first customer and for helping to promote his new product.

The council action came despite City Manager Jim Prosser's caution that the city could open itself up to liability if there are problems after the city alters the manufacturer's Yardy containers.

Brokaw says he has insurance to cover such a thing.

Before last night's council decision, Brokaw, 56, of 2249 Grande Ave. SE, had lobbied council members and city staff for some months, pointing to a survey conducted in 2007 by council member Monica Vernon's Vernon Research Group, which Brokaw said documented some 2,400 injuries related to the use of the Yardy in Cedar Rapids. Vernon wasn't on the council at the time of the study.

“I thought it was people who were careless, clumsy and out of shape,” Brokaw said in an interview earlier Thursday about those having problems with the Yardys. He changed his mind, he said, after he cut off an ear lobe in an encounter with his Yardy.

Prosser on Thursday said the city was aware of some problems with the yard-waste carts, but he said the city has no injury data other than that provided by the Vernon firm's research for Brokaw. No one has sued the city because of the Yardy, Prosser said.

Mark Jones, the city's solid-waste superintendent, said Thursday that the city had about 10 complaints about the Yardy in the summer of 2000, which prompted the city to send out a notice to customers to make sure the lid of the cart was closed before moving it. Since the summer of 2002, the city has had, perhaps, three complaints, he said.

Only council member Chuck Wieneke opposed buying Brokaw's CartGuards, saying the council was ignoring outstanding legal questions. Wieneke also called his council colleagues “hypocrites” for insisting Pat Ball, the city's utilities director, work harder to make cuts in his utilities budget even as the council was adding $540,000 to the budget to protect people from something that Wieneke said they could protect themselves from.

Earlier Thursday, Brokaw said there are several manufacturers of yard carts, a few to which he said he has pitched his product. He said manufacturers have told him that his product would increase the cost of the cart too much and so put them at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

In 1991, Brokaw created Brokaw Vending Co. along with his wife, Katherine, in the basement of their home. They turned the vending company, which still carries the Brokaw name, into a $15-million-a-year business before selling it to PepsiAmericas in 2002.

Before the vending business, Brokaw was in the farm-equipment business in Monticello, his hometown, where he said he invented and successfully marketed a hydraulic pump used in the agricultural industry.

His 14-year-old son, Jack, an eighth grader at McKinley Middle School, helped come up with the early prototype of the CartGuard, Brokaw said.