STANTON : Council Approves Plans for Auto Yard

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a state-of-the-art automobile dismantling and recycling business is planned for a site formerly occupied by a junkyard.

But many mobile home owners who live next door complain that a junkyard by any other name is still a junkyard.

At a packed meeting this week, council members voted 4 to 1 to approve plans by Pick Your Part Auto Recycling to build a nine-acre complex. Junked cars would be drained of their fluids at the facility, where customers could strip off usable parts for purchase.

Pick Your Part took over a 30-year-old junkyard at 10181 Beach Blvd. in 1984, but its permit to operate was not renewed in 1990. The site has been closed, and many neighbors said they would rather see it remain that way.

“We were told they were going to discontinue, or we never would have bought there,” said Norene Jones, who moved to Anaheim Mobile Estates, next to the auto yard, three years ago.

Because the lot straddles Stanton and Anaheim, each city must give approval to its half of the site. The Anaheim Planning Commission is still reviewing the northern half. No completion date has been set for the project.

Stanton Councilman Harry Dotson cast the sole vote against the project.

Pick Your Part expects between 12,000 and 13,000 cars a year, said Cindi R. Galfin, who presented the project to the council. The city would be guaranteed a minimum of $125,000 annually from sales on the parts and a $5 fee for each vehicle, she said.

About 40 mobile home park residents attended the council meeting, many carrying signs that read: “No Junk Yard. Keep Air Clean.”

“No matter what walls or trees they put up, it’s still a junkyard,” resident Kathryn Abel said.

Galfin said her company, which operates seven auto yards in California and Texas, plans to spend $1.5 million to renovate the site. The company will build 10-foot walls and enclose the area where oil, gas and other fluids are drained from the cars. A security guard will be on duty 24 hours a day, she said.

Pete Muth, the owner of Orco Block, a block-making business on Beach Boulevard in Stanton, spoke in favor of the project.

Pick Your Part “knows better than to spend money to open up here without being compatible with the community,” he said.

Recycled Junkyard: Some mobile home owners are protesting for an auto yard.