Firms That Tow Abandoned Cars Are Crying Uncle

Most towing companies in the county agree on one thing: hauling abandoned vehicles is no longer good business.

The companies contend they are being cheated out of the right to make an honest buck by remaining faithful to multiyear city contracts that oblige them to pick up all abandoned vehicles. They say it costs them more to tow the cars than they can recoup from selling them.

For years, companies have competed for city towing contracts, which involve answering calls from police for everything from stalled cars to accidents. Towing such vehicles is profitable. But the requirement to tow abandoned vehicles eats severely into those earnings.

Companies in a handful of cities throughout San Diego County have brought the problem to the attention of civic leaders but no final solution is in sight.

The owners of one firm in Southeast San Diego recently took matters into their own hands--they refused to pick up abandoned vehicles, saying they were losing money by providing the service.

Other firms are living with the problem but don’t like it.

Patti Dubois, a manager with Metropolitan Towing, which operates in Kearny Mesa and Pacific Beach, said her company’s revenues for the year have decreased and that management believes this is linked to the cost of towing abandoned cars, as Metropolitan contracted to do.

Handling the abandoned vehicles is a time-consuming and costly process, she said.

It takes six weeks to complete the paper work on each abandoned vehicle with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, Dubois said. While a vehicle awaits its fate, the company isn’t paid a dime. The firm may collect a storage fee--about $17 a day--but only if a vehicle’s owner shows up to claim it.

If nobody claims the car or truck, Metropolitan Towing puts the vehicle up for sale at the auctions it holds each week. If it isn’t sold, the vehicle gets scrapped. Metropolitan Towing, like all the other towing firms, receives $8 to $10 on each vehicle it sends to the scrap yard.

“The cost involved is just outrageous and we don’t recover anywhere near what it costs,” she said, noting that the firm usually sells about 10 vehicles a week but has to scrap another 10 that fail to attract a buyer.

“We are doing a service and we’re losing money for it,” Dubois said.

Part of the problem for the towing firms is a requirement that

they strip all vehicles of their exhaust systems, fuel tanks and other parts before shipping them to the scrap yard.

That time-consuming and costly process is necessary because of recent fears over a toxic by-product that results when fuel tanks and other parts are scrapped.

The byproduct, called “fluff,” contains lead oxide that makes it a low-level hazardous waste. Earlier this year, hazardous concentrations of cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were also discovered in fluff at steel-processing plants in Anaheim and San Diego.

State environmental officials adopted regulations in 1984 prohibiting automobile shredders from dumping the waste in standard landfills unless they removed the exhaust systems and other parts that cause the contamination.

Ramon Corona, president of Pacific Steel Co., the only steel-processing plant in the county, said his yard buys about 350 vehicles a day, both abandoned and others. Much of the fluff the yard accumulates is taken to its sister company in Mexicali, Mexico, where nonferrous metal is removed and the rest dumped.

He’s noticed a decrease of about 10% to 20% in the number of vehicles his yard gets, and he suspects the burdensome new state rules have something to do with it.

Fluff is “not just a hazardous material, it’s an economical problem,” said Ed Wood, president of the San Diego Chapter of the California Tow Truck Assn. and owner of El Cajon-based Glenview Towing.

Effects of the problem have appeared in many forms in the county.

For example, in at least three cities, moratoriums on the towing of abandoned vehicles have been instituted by the city’s officials pending a resolution of the fluff problem. With the moratoriums in effect, more and more abandoned vehicles are littering the streets of the county.

“The streets look like hell,” Wood said.

He said abandoned vehicles are becoming increasingly visible in El Cajon because none of the city’s towing firms “wants to take them.”

National City has also experienced problems with abandoned vehicles, largely because of the city’s moratorium on the impounding of the vehicles. Tom Moynahan Towing, which had a contract with the city, asked for the moratorium after the firm’s officials realized the deal was costing them money.

“The council has realized that a real, genuine problem exists,” said Capt. Wayne Fowler of the National City police.

Fowler said the Police Department is currently doing whatever it can to contact the owners of abandoned vehicles and have them move the cars from the streets but the number of vehicles continues to grow, as in other parts of the county.

According to a recent San Diego city report, the 12 companies that serve in exclusive districts for the San Diego Police Department tow an average of 2,288 vehicles a month, about 42% of which are abandoned vehicles. And the percentage is increasing because the population is growing and stricter smog regulations are leading many motorists to abandon old cars rather than pay for repairs, according to the report.

One firm that attempted to break its contract to tow abandoned vehicles in San Diego ran afoul of city officials.

A to Z Towing, which works in the Southeast San Diego area, recently served a seven-day suspension for violating its contract with the city by refusing to haul abandoned vehicles except when they were needed as evidence by police.

Jessica Wineteer, one of the owners of the company, said that because about 1,750 of the 4,300 vehicles the firm hauls every month are abandoned, it’s been getting to the point where “we can’t afford to tow.”

She said abandoned vehicles are particularly prevalent in her area because of a city program designed to clean up Southeast San Diego.

Project First Class, which started in 1984 after passage by the San Diego City Council, was intended to clear abandoned vehicles from the area’s economically depressed neighborhoods in the belief that many of the owners could not afford to repair them or remove them from the streets. As a result, a large number of vehicles are being cited in the area, which translates into a flood of service calls for A to Z.

Wineteer said city officials “are now dealing with the (abandoned vehicle) problem, but they should have worked with us a little earlier.”

After the owners of the company brought their case before city officials, a 15-member task force--composed of members of the towing and dismantling industry as well as city and county representatives--was formed to look into the issues and attempt to find a legislative solution.

According to George Penn, an assistant to the city manager and chairman of the task force, the group plans to make recommendations to the city manager later this year.

He said one possible answer to the problem might be adopting a new process that neutralizes fluff through chemical coding and allows shredders to safely dump it.

Wood, who is part of the task force, said one long-term solution that can be applied to the problem of towing firms losing out on abandoned vehicles might be the establishment of a state fund generated through an assessment fee on motorists.

“It looks like there may be some relief in sight,” he said.