It’s a Race to Keep Up With Junked Cars : Nuisances: Abandoned vehicles are viewed not only as eyesores but as health hazards. A proposed law would help keep them off the streets.

To neighbors, they’re eyesores.

To unlicensed auto dismantlers, they represent a chance to make some money by cannibalizing tires, fenders and other salable parts.

To car lovers, they’re reminders of glory days when they had a showroom gleam.

And to local officials, the more than 6,000 vehicles illegally abandoned on the streets of Ventura County each year--at least one for every 100 cars and trucks registered in the county--are health and safety hazards.

Rodents, mosquitoes and other disease-bearing pests gather in cars dumped in the canyons north of Somis and in a ravine off Balcom Canyon Road between Moorpark and Santa Paula.

Oil and gasoline drip from the engines of autos hidden by illegal dismantlers off Ventura Avenue in the western county, polluting the air and presenting a fire danger.

In parts of Oxnard and Ventura, officials hurry to remove stripped-down cars before they damage a neighborhood’s appearance so badly that they encourage crime.

Often the cars are abandoned because they simply stopped running and their owners couldn’t or wouldn’t move them, said Liz Klowcow, a code enforcement officer with the county Building and Safety Department.

When such a car is obviously inoperable, Klowcow and other authorities can have it hauled away as a nuisance or health hazard. Cars that might be in running condition must be tagged for 72 hours before being impounded.

“We find a lot of abandoned vehicles on the streets in the beach areas, such as Silver Strand and Hollywood-by-the-Sea,” Klowcow said. “And some people in El Rio like to strip inoperable cars and leave them at the side of the road.”

Klowcow, who patrols the county’s unincorporated areas, spends much of her time tracking down people who “collect” old cars.

“They say they plan to fix them up but that they haven’t had a chance yet. Sometimes the cars are so rusty it’s obvious the owners have been procrastinating for years.”

At the extreme, a self-described collector in Lockwood Valley, in the remote northeast corner of the county, has gathered from 1,000 to 1,500 inoperable vehicles, Klowcow said.

“He claims he wants to create a ‘car garden’ or a ‘time tunnel of vehicles,’ ” she said. “But we and the Department of Motor Vehicles feel it’s a matter of illegal dismantling.”

A case against him is pending, Klowcow said. For the present, she said, the owner has agreed to drain fluids from the autos.

In the city of Ventura, Police Sgt. Carl Handy spearheads one of the county’s most active drives against abandoned vehicles.

Among other things, Handy has organized an annual campaign, Operation Clean Sweep, which in January netted 279 abandoned and unregistered cars. “We’re responding to about 10 complaints a day,” he said.

Handy said there are four or five areas where abandoned cars seem to turn up in Ventura. “We find them near auto repair centers and in industrial areas near freeway off-ramps. People tend to leave them in those places.”

Handy thinks some headway is being made against the tide of abandoned autos. The one-week 1989 Operation Clean Sweep picked up 329 cars, 50 more than this year’s.

“In early 1989 we were running an average of 450-plus complaints a month,” Handy said. “That number is definitely down now.”

A key reason for the improvement, most experts agree, is that Ventura County officials tend to scrap unsafe impounded cars as soon as legally possible, removing them from the streets forever.

Bill Forestelle, the DMV’s senior investigator for Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, said this strategy has been working in the campaign against illegal dismantlers who have set up shop off Ventura Avenue near Ventura.

“Last year we located 10 individuals who were dismantling cars illegally in that area,” Forestelle said. “They were working on from 25 to 50 cars apiece.”

Throughout the county, Forestelle estimated, he and his fellow investigators uncovered at least 20 such operations last year, some of which were cannibalizing well over 100 autos a year.

In many cases, Forestelle said, the car’s ownership is vague. “Even if they could establish ownership, illegal dismantlers aren’t about to pay the sales taxes, license fees and smog certificate charges” to acquire legal ownership of the cars they’re working on.

“In many cases, getting a smog certificate is out of the question, since the car doesn’t even have an engine.”

In Oxnard, code enforcement official Richard McIntosh estimated that the city tows 1,200 abandoned and stripped-down vehicles a year.

“One of our continuing problems involves people who think they can set up repair shops in their driveways,” he said. “If somebody wants to fix his own car in a reasonable time and a reasonable manner, we have no objection.

“But you can’t set up your own commercial garage at home. The city code was amended a few years ago to say that vehicles parked in a residential area must be registered to residents of the area. That helped us go after people operating repair businesses out of their homes.”

One of the county’s most widely publicized cases involving abandoned autos was that of Erkki Sarkinen, who stored 25 junked cars, as well as tons of building materials, trash and other eyesores, on his property in Newbury Park.

Neighbors complained for years and the county even obtained a court order against Sarkinen in 1981, but the cars weren’t removed until after his death in 1988.

The number of abandoned vehicles in Ventura County represents slightly more than 1% of the 573,000 vehicles registered in the county.

Statewide, more than 400,000 vehicles were abandoned in 1988, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to a study by the County Supervisors Assn. of California and the League of California Cities.

The health and safety hazards presented by the vehicular corpses are so serious that, for the second time in two years, the Legislature is expected to pass a bill aimed at them.

Co-sponsored by Assembly members Steve Clute (D-Riverside) and Carol Bentley (R-El Cajon), it would authorize counties to add a dollar to registration fees to pay for towing and disposing of abandoned vehicles.

A similar bill passed both houses last year but was vetoed by Gov. George Deukmejian. The new version, according to Clute aide Bob Giroux, might win Deukmejian’s support.

Even if more money is provided for towing and storage, some officials wonder whether they’ll ever be able to keep up with abandoned vehicles.

Police in Camarillo, as in several other cities, assign part-time cadets to follow up reports of inoperable cars.

“We’re towing fewer cars this year than last, but it’s mainly because we don’t have enough personnel to do as much as we’d like about the problem,” Sgt. Bill Boyd said. “If we had the people, we could tow a lot more.”

ABANDONED VEHICLES Estimated number of abandoned vehicles towed in various jurisdictions in Ventura County in 1989: Oxnard: 1,200 Simi Valley: 70 City of Ventura: 1,200 Moorpark: 60 Thousand Oaks: 350 Camarillo: 130 Unincorporated: 1,100 By DMV: 2,200 TOTAL: 6,210