GILROY
– That old, dusty, dented car that looks abandoned and has been
parked on the same street corner for the past two months isn’t
being ignored.
It’s just one of dozens on an overloaded city official’s
list.
GILROY – That old, dusty, dented car that looks abandoned and has been parked on the same street corner for the past two months isn’t being ignored.
It’s just one of dozens on an overloaded city official’s list.
As a result, there is a two-month wait for a tag-and-tow process that, legally, only needs to take four days.
Gary Muroaka is the Gilroy police community service officer in charge of abandoned vehicle abatement. His other duties include parking enforcement and permits for taxis, tow trucks and vendors.
During the week of July 18 to 24, Muroaka said he logged at least 39 new reports for vehicles that met the blight ordinance’s criteria. That’s not an unusually high amount, he said. He couldn’t provide a weekly average, however.
Danny Rubalcava, a dispatcher at Bracco’s Towing & Transport, said Muroaka calls to have about three vehicles a week towed.
That’s one towed for every 13 tagged. It’s unknown how many of those were moved first by their owners.
When Muroaka came into work Wednesday morning, 17 voice mail messages were waiting for him. After listening to them, he had nine new vehicles to check. By 10 a.m., he had checked all nine and used orange stickers to tag the seven that met the criteria of the city’s blight ordinance, which the City Council passed last fall.
That wasn’t an abnormally busy morning, he said.
Say there’s a dusty 1970s-era van with four flat tires and flaking brown paint that hasn’t moved from the curb outside your home in two months. You’re sure it doesn’t run, it looks awful, and you begin to wonder whether the owner just left it there to rot. Finally, you can’t stand it anymore and decide to report it.
You call City Hall, and they refer you to Muroaka. You call him and get his voice mail, on which he says in a friendly voice that he is three days behind on tagging vehicles and two months behind on having them towed.
“Two months behind? I would think, ‘Wow, they need more help,'” said Rosemary Ledon, who manages the Gilroy Apartments on IOOF Avenue and says she reports abandoned vehicles to the city “on a regular basis.”
After a vehicle is tagged, its owner has 72 hours before the city can have it towed. In practice, however, that time lapse is usually anywhere from two weeks to nine.
Once Muroaka reports a car to Gilroy tow companies, they have 24 hours to pick it up, but first he has to prepare a report on each car, including a photograph. That paperwork is what gets sacrificed in the time crunch that is Muroaka’s schedule.
A few citizens help Muroaka tag cars, log their information and double-check them as part of the city’s Volunteers in Policing program, but that eight to 12 hours a week of volunteer time isn’t enough to prevent a lag.
As of Wednesday, Muroaka said his oldest tagged, untowed car had been reported to him June 9, 49 days before.
The pace is getting better, however, Muroaka said. Before he took over this post, he said, the wait was three months. Now he’s down to tagging cars within a day of the report.
Since June, however, he’s been catching up on a backlog of cases that built up as he focused on other aspects of his job. For one thing, he spent five days straight setting up his computer database. For another, he had to process permits for all the city’s ice cream vendors, taxis and tow trucks – all of which come due in June.
“I get caught up on one thing, and I fall behind on another,” Muroaka said. “It’s just cyclical. … But when people call, I try to be responsive.”
If Ledon got the two-month-wait message while trying to report a junk vehicle, she said she would wouldn’t rely too much on the city. Instead, she said she would try to find the car’s owner.
“Generally, they will move it themselves rather than pay the towing fees,” she said.
Ledon said she had never before heard of a wait as long as two months; sometimes the response is very swift, she said. Nevertheless, she added, “I’ve been told before that they are very busy and backlogged.”
City Administrator Jay Baksa said he didn’t know the wait was as long as two months, but he said, “I do know we’ve got an issue. There’s an awful lot of abandoned vehicles in the city of Gilroy.”
By being realistic with people on the voice-mail about the expected wait, Muroaka said he heads off some potential complaints. He still gets a few, but not many.
“Some people will get angry that we’re not there the split second they call,” he said. “I’m more than willing to take more volunteers. If people find this an offensive condition, they’re more than welcome to sign up for the Citizens Police Academy.”
Graduating the 13-week academy, which begins in March, is a prerequisite for the VIP program.
Removing abandoned cars is more or less a favor to the city from tow companies, which get paying business from car wrecks handled by city police and fire departments.
The city doesn’t pay to tow a vehicle, and if the owner doesn’t pay to pick it from the tow yard, the company must let it take up space for 35 days before scrapping it. The scrapper doesn’t pay much, if anything.
To report an abandoned vehicle, call 846-0320.
