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Theft of a much-used hot dog cart from a local homeless outreach project has put a damper on efforts to provide meals to the community’s most needy. Compassion Highway Project director Melissa Mayne said she discovered the small silver food cart, which had been stored at a board member’s home near Lozier Lane, had disappeared when she went to pick it up for a feed planned last week. Mayne said her volunteer group was heavily reliant on the hot dog cart due to its capacity to cook and heat several hundred hot dogs at a time. Without a facility from which to offer her community “feeds,” Mayne, who founded the homeless outreach effort about two-and-a-half years ago, said the portable hot dog cart had become a major asset for her organization since it was donated two years ago. “It’s able to cook, heat and warm the hot dog buns for a large number of hot dogs. For summer time, it’s been really useful because we do a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers for our feeds,” Mayne said. “So I was planning to use it this past week because we were ... expecting to feed over 400 people. Then we learned it was gone. It was really upsetting. We’re basically just out of luck for feeding the number of people that it helped us to be able to feed.” Mayne described the cart as about 4 feet by 4 feet, made of stainless steel, with a white propane tank attached and a round canopy colored red, white and blue. The cart, which has a sink for hand-washing, was donated to Mayne’s group by a local business owner and valued at between $3,500 and $4,000. “It was someone who used to run the hot dog cart and, at the end of the day, would give all the leftover hot dogs to the homeless. He specifically donated it to us because he wanted it to be used to feed the homeless,” she said. Mayne said the cart is large and heavy so it would have been difficult to take too far without a truck. Local homeless people are on the lookout for the cart, and she’s hopeful someone will provide information on its whereabouts. “Whoever took it definitely would have had a truck to haul it off,” she noted. “We’re basically out of luck for buying a new one. Like, it’s not even an option. Our donations go directly to help the homeless, and we don’t have funds to spend on anything like this,” said Mayne. “I’m really sad that someone would do this. The worst part is that the person who donated this to us meant for it to help the homeless. It’s also sad because we were getting ready to be able to use it more often and to be able to feed more and more people,” she said. “Our community, thankfully, is really good about helping with food. So we’ll just make do. We have no choice but to figure it all out. People count on us to make things work.” Anyone with information about the cart is asked to call Medford police and reference case 18-14924. For information, see www.compassionhighwayproject.org . Reach freelance writer Buffy Pollock at [email protected] .