Reform of Tow Pacts Opposed by Author : City Hall: Braude says changes to his proposal would cost the city millions. Official police garages would pay franchise fees.

After years of study and debate, the Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to vote today on a new system for licensing police-sanctioned tow truck services, but the idea’s chief sponsor now says he expects to oppose the plan unless his colleagues agree to amend it at the last minute.

Moreover, Councilman Marvin Braude, who initiated the effort to reform the licensing of so-called official police garages in 1991, said he will urge Mayor Richard Riordan to veto the proposal if it passes the council without amendments.

Braude complained that the proposal does not start the process of accepting bids from tow companies until 1998 and only phases them in after that. The result of those delays, he said, will be millions of dollars in lost revenue to the city and perpetuation of a system that the councilman maintains is a violation of the City Charter.

“On the face of it, something is wrong,” said Braude, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee. “If this passes, I will go to the mayor and say: ‘Dick, you ran on a platform of running the city like a business. You should veto this ordinance.’ ”

To avoid taking that step, Braude is asking the council to approve a modified version of the ordinance, which would call on the Board of Police Commissioners to begin entering into contracts with tow services “as soon as reasonably possible,” rather than in 1998.

Official police garages, which tow and store vehicles at the request of the Los Angeles Police Department and other city agencies, have been the subject of controversies for years. In 1994, for instance, Viertel’s Automotive Service came under fire for its handling of the Ford Bronco recovered in front of O.J. Simpson’s house after the murders of his %x-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

While the Bronco was in Viertel’s custody, an employee took receipts from the vehicle as souvenirs, complicating investigators’ ability to use other evidence recovered from it. Eventually, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito ruled in favor of the prosecution in that dispute, but not before Viertel’s had been publicly embarrassed and subjected to a Police Commission investigation.

The larger dispute over the garages involves whether the city gets enough in return for giving them the right to tow cars for the Police Department, as well as the Department of Transportation and the Department of Building and Safety. Those contracts allow 17 of the city’s approximately 300 towing companies to corner the market on city business in their respective geographic areas.

Some of those companies have been the designated tow services for their areas for more than 40 years.

But the city receives no money in return for granting those lucrative franchises, an oversight that Braude moved in 1991 to correct. According to a 1993 city audit, putting the garage permits out for bid and charging a franchise fee could result in more than $7 million in annual city revenue.

In his report to the mayor and City Council, City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie urged, among other things, that bidding procedures be adopted for selecting official police garages and that the city attorney’s office, in consultation with other agencies, develop an annual franchise fee to cover the costs of selecting, developing and monitoring the contracts with the companies.

Braude proposed approving those and other recommendations. But as his motion moved through the City Council committee structure, garage representatives urged council members not to implement the changes immediately. The Transportation Committee agreed to their request for a delay, adding language that would postpone the initiation of the bidding and franchise fees until 1998.

The postponement would allow the towing companies time to recover their investments in land and equipment, according to a letter sent last week to council members by Ken Spiker, a lobbyist.

That change, however, has created the odd situation in which Braude now finds himself opposed to the idea that he initiated.