Driving Away Unwanted Cars

David Lopez remembers very well the days when junked and abandoned cars would appear overnight, like mushrooms, in his Santa Ana neighborhood.

“They were in driveways, up on blocks, they were sitting in the street without engines,” said Lopez, 63, a retired custodian. “Some people had five on their lawn so they could use the parts to keep one car running.”

Those days all but ended in the early 1990s, when the state began adding $1 to each motor vehicle registration fee to start an abandoned-vehicle removal fund.

With the $16 million returned to Orange County for distribution since then, Santa Ana and other cities have been able to pay police and zoning enforcement personnel to ticket or tow away roughly 25,000 cars a year, enough to fill two times over the massive new parking lot at Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim.

But the junkers may be coming back.

The abandoned-vehicle subsidy is scheduled to expire next year. Without that funding, officials fear that cities will become much less aggressive in combating the blight.

They worry that the rusting hulks will again appear on streets and in driveways, threatening property values, polluting the environment and causing traffic hazards.

“These abandoned cars bring down property values. Get a few of these things in your area, and the next thing you know, the whole neighborhood starts to go down the toilet,” said Assemblyman Tom Harman (R-Huntington Beach).

“Getting rid of them also improves the environment. Basically, these cars are abandoned but not necessarily inoperable. A lot of them are older vehicles that cause pollution.”

Because of those concerns, Harman and the Orange County Transportation Authority are advocating a 10-year extension of the program and the $1 registration fee. An attempt to pass similar legislation last year was vetoed by the governor, but proponents say they have revised the bill to make it more acceptable.

Among other changes, use of the funds would require approval of county supervisors and the program would be more closely monitored by the state controller.

Advocates of the extension say the subsidy helps in two important ways: It combats blight by giving cities a financial incentive to remove abandoned cars, and it aids in fighting crime.

“Cities in Los Angeles County do not receive money from the state to remove abandoned vehicles,” said Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Gary Wosk. “The cities contract independent tow truck operators.”

But in Orange County’s Buena Park, for example, more than $600,000 in vehicle removal funds has been used to hire workers who search for and remove abandoned junkers.

“Without that money, we’d need police officers to do the work,” said Art Brown, a county transportation agency director and Buena Park City Council member.

“When you consider that it takes an officer 30 minutes to write a report and even more time to wait for a tow truck, it makes more sense to have that officer on the street doing other things.”

Collecting Millions to Remove Junkers

Since Orange County started its vehicle removal program in 1992, its cities have ordered 222,372 cars removed from public and private properties. Of that number, 176,545 were moved voluntarily by the owners and 45,827 were towed away.

Santa Ana, Anaheim and Huntington Beach have been the biggest beneficiaries, collecting $3.4 million, $1.6 million and $890,000, respectively, in state funds, officials said.

The county’s fund is overseen and distributed by county transportation officials, who have lobbied heavily for extending the program.

“We think this is a good idea because it would cost the cities extra money to remove these cars if this program ceased,” Brown said.

In Santa Ana, where more than 15,000 abandoned cars have been towed, police and code enforcement officials handle the work. Police deal with vehicles on public property, such as streets, while code enforcement personnel handle cars on private property.