Abandoned Autos Leave a Tough Road to Tow : Cars: From neighborhood disputes to games of cat-and-mouse, Orange’s vehicle abatement crew is kept on the move.

Eric Grove hardly needed to look at the yellow crayon mark on the tire. There were too many other giveaways: the dead leaves that had eddied into piles between the wheels and the curb, the mud that had dried and caked onto the tires, the bits of litter that had collected beneath the undercarriage, the spider webs.

But the crayon mark was absolute confirmation; the line on the tire matched up with the line on the pavement exactly. This Plymouth Volare, finish and upholstery fading and cracking in the sun, had not been moved in at least 72 hours. It was now officially abandoned. The next few miles it would travel would be from the back of a flatbed tow truck.

This scene, and slight variations of it, are played out about 8,500 times a year in Orange County where, for various reasons, dozens of cars each day are parked on public or private property and their drivers simply take the keys and walk away.

To neighbors and law enforcement officials, these abandoned vehicles are, at best, an eyesore (the “public nuisance” section of the Orange municipal code section governs abandoned cars, as it does in many other cities). They are often in dilapidated shape and, left to corrode, they can constitute nothing so much as a ton or more of concentrated litter.

“It makes the city look bad,” said Grove, one of two police cadets who staff the Abandoned Vehicle Program for the Orange Police Department, one of the longest-established programs in the county. “It has a big impact.”

But vehicle abatement, as the process is often called, is a bit trickier than mere street sweeping. Automobiles remain major investments for most drivers, and the people who tag and tow them when they are abandoned don’t take those steps lightly.

“You have to use discretion,” Grove said. “We don’t want to go into someone’s driveway, for instance, and take their car away. I’m not going to go out to a clean 1990 Jag and try to gyp people out of money. Unfortunately, we’re caught in the middle.”

Many abandoned-car cases, said Grove, do not involve stolen vehicles but rather disputes between neighbors, “vendettas” he calls them.

Typically, the police will receive a call from a resident complaining that a neighbor’s car has been left on the street unmoved for a long time. Sometimes the mere presence of police tagging the car--the card warns the owner that if the car is not moved in 72 hours it will be towed--is enough to end the dispute. In other cases, however, it begins what Orange police traffic division Capt. Dean Richards called “a cat-and-mouse kind of thing.”

The game is typically played this way, said Richards: The car is tagged, but within three days the owner drives it a couple of miles and returns it. This satisfies the municipal code section that stipulates that if a car is moved one mile within 72 hours of being tagged it is no longer considered abandoned.

“It’s a real battle,” Richards said. “They’re as hardheaded as they can be. A lot of times we’re walking into a Hatfield-McCoy situation. You just have to gauge the feeling of the neighborhood.”

Even dicier are calls about abandoned cars that are sitting on private property--typically a driveway or vacant lot. In such cases, Grove said, the police attempt to contact both the vehicle owner and the owner of the property on which it sits. More latitude is offered. If a car on private property is tagged, Grove said he usually makes a follow-up call in 10 days, not three, “and we won’t tow for at least a month or possibly more.”

There are exceptions. “If it’s posing a hazard--say it’s up on four blocks and there could be kids playing around it--then I’m going to tow it right away.”

Sometimes, the problem can be solved simply by garaging the car. Enclosing it in a structure satisfies the law.

Another sure bet for a quick tow is any car abandoned on the freeway. The California Highway Patrol can get rid of it after only four hours, said Todd Murphy, special projects manager for the Orange County Transit Authority.

The cars Grove tags are not always in sorry shape. On a recent morning, he returned to a residential street where, days before, he had discovered a Volkswagen Beetle, perhaps 25 years old, squatting over the telltale leaves and litter. Despite its age and apparent immobility, the car appeared in good shape. Still, it hadn’t been moved since Grove last saw it--the yellow crayon mark lined up--so it was declared “ready for tow.”

For some reason--Grove said he has no idea why--Volkswagens and older Datsuns seem to be abandoned more than any other make of car.

Few abandoned cars in Orange are stolen. Most of those, Grove said, tend to appear in Santa Ana, one of the three cities in the county with densely populated low-income areas that appear to have the biggest load of abandoned cars (Westminster and Garden Grove are the two others).

And, Grove said, if it is found that an abandoned car is stolen, it ceases to be his responsibility. It is impounded and searched by crime investigators, and the legal owner is tracked down through Department of Motor Vehicle records. However, said Grove, he has found only four abandoned cars in the last four years that have turned out to be stolen.

How big is the abandoned car problem in Orange County? A recent study commissioned by OCTA found that there were about 37,330 calls about abandoned vehicles on public property investigated by local authorities in 1990 and an additional 5,557 calls involving such vehicles on private property. The study also showed that, on average, one out of five abandoned vehicles are eventually towed.

Who pays for this? Up to this point, California taxpayers do. Earlier this year, OCTA, the CHP, the county Board of Supervisors and the majority of the cities in Orange County voted to create a new Abandoned Vehicle Abatement Authority that will reimburse cities for the costs of removal of abandoned vehicles. The money will come as part of a new $1 surcharge to be added to motorists’ annual motor vehicle registration renewal fees that started this month.

A special state fund used to pay for vehicle removal, but it was discontinued five years ago, Murphy said.

Under the new program, cities will receive a total of $61 per vehicle if it is towed from public property after an initial and follow-up investigation, and $76 for the same actions if the vehicle is towed from private property.

Once the car reaches the towing company’s lot, however, matters for the most part go from public to private. The car is now the towing company’s headache, and a headache it can be. Through use of DMV records, the company notifies not only the DMV, but the current owner and all previous owners of the vehicle that it is to be the subject of a lien sale, said Mike Gugliotta, a vice president of Farwest Towing in Orange, one of four companies that contracts with the Orange Police Department. When the current owner of record is located, he is notified by registered mail that his car has been impounded, and he is billed for towing, storage and costs of the lien sale.

(The towing fees among the Orange contractors is $70 for most standard vehicles, and storage costs $20 a day. Lien sale costs range from $70 to $100 depending on the value of the car.)

All this takes time and money and paperwork and is not particularly popular with towing contractors, a handful of whom perform vehicle abatement chores for police departments on a rotating basis.

Occasionally, the owners want the car back. In order to get it, however, they still must pay the towing company’s charges, as well as produce proof of ownership and a release from the police agency that ordered the vehicle towed in the first place, said Gugliotta.

That, however, is not usually what happens. Occasionally the company will sell the car at a public auction, but most of the cars end up being sold at auction to wrecking yards, said Gugliotta, where salvageable parts are removed before the cars are crushed and sold for scrap.

“We’ll generally keep it for a month or so and then crush it and send it to a mill, where it’s shredded and sold as recycled steel,” said Chris McElroy, the vice president of Pick Your Part Auto Dismantling, whose corporate offices are in Anaheim.

Before the car becomes a cube of tangled steel, however, one last bit of paperwork remains, McElroy said. The wrecking company files a document called an acquisition with the DMV notifying that agency that the car is going to be dismantled and junked.

The wreckers make out better than the towers, McElroy said. The primary reason that tow companies rotate in their response to abandoned car calls, he said, is that they seldom make back the money they expend on the process. Wrecking companies seldom find that abandoned cars yield up many salable parts but, said McElroy, for the most part they make a profit on them.

“Usually,” he said, “abandoned cars are not desirable cars. You can never turn junk into new. Once in a while (the tow companies) come up with a winner. The better ones end up back on the street. But most of them end up with us.”

For police employees such as Grove, the process is cyclical. There are, he said, far more calls about abandoned cars received by his department in summertime than in the winter. In the colder months they get about 15 a day. In the season that is just ahead, they can expect to field as many as 95.

The reason is deceptively simple: “In the winter, it rains and that cleans up a lot of the cars,” said Grove. “We’ll find most in the fall when all the dead leaves collect underneath.”

Year-around, however, the task remains constant, an effort to haul away a very specific sort of litter that comes in ton-sized chunks. There are a lot of those yellow crayons in Grove’s car.

“It’s a front-line battle,” said Richards. “We’d be choked if we eased up for any period at all.”