‘We have a horrible problem,’ says driver as abandoned cars plague neighborhood – thieves are targeting specific feature | 2JS504Y | 2024-04-30 12:08:01
'We have a horrible problem,' says driver as abandoned cars plague neighborhood – thieves are targeting specific feature | 2JS504Y | 2024-04-30 12:08:01
RESIDENTS have complained about the hazards associated with their city's growing abandoned vehicle problem for years.
Now, it seems authorities are planning to get ahead of the issue with a new bill.
Abandoned vehicles have been plaguing residents of Honolulu, Hawaii the 2010's – with headlines highlighting the issue in 2018 and 2019.
Thousands of abandoned vehicles were reported to the police in 2015, with the highest number being in 2017 at 1,221 on the island, reported Honolulu Civil Beat in 2019.
"Abandoned vehicles are everywhere on our island," police Major Robert Wagner told the outlet.
Vehicles left to the elements are rarely left alone – within a short period, Geneva Jackson, who works closely with the Hawaiian Acres Road Corp says, they're often destroyed.
Wheels and tires are removed, then the windows are usually smashed, and sometimes they're vandalized by being set on fire.
She's even found vehicles flipped onto the roof to make removing the catalytic converters easier to remove.
"We have a horrible problem with abandoned vehicles," she said.
"What I've seen this year alone, the Police Department has been on it as far as removing abandoned vehicles."
In 2023, the state's Derelict/Abandoned Vehicle Section of the Department of Environmental Management started a free vehicle disposal program to remove abandoned vehicles from private property, reported the Spectrum Local News.
The program gives residents the ability to have vehicles that are no longer running removed from their property to avoid being dumped on city streets.
<!-- End of Brightcove Player --> With the new program, residents can apply for vehicle removal online.
If the vehicle in question meets certain and strict requirements, the city of Honolulu will remove the vehicle for free.
The program was part of a broader effort to clear up the island, as in June, FOX affiliate KHON2 reported a new bill passed to "grapple" the looming abandoned vehicle crisis.
Lawmakers felt that vacant vehicles acted as "magnets" for illegal activity, like hiding weapons and drugs.
The second program the state started during the same year was a storage program that helped prevent vehicles from being towed.
"If you're going out of town or you know you're going away for a while, you can store it so that you don't have to rack up that past registration," said Honolulu City Council member Audria Tupola during a video call.
<!--googleoff: all--> <blockquote class="article__quote"> </blockquote> <!--googleon: all--> Aside from a storage issue, Tupola said that another reason people may abandon their vehicles is the high associated costs.
"If anything happens, maybe you lose a job, you're in between jobs, and then you start to get behind on registration, it is almost impossible to try to catch yourself up from two years to three years," she explained.
One of the ways she plans to help avoid vehicle abandonment is to work with the Department of Customer Services's (DCS) Division of Motor Vehicle Control.
"So, I'm proposing that we have leniency for those who have expired registrations, maybe for more than five or seven years," she said.
<p class="article__content--intro"> Reporting an abandoned vehicle is important for keeping city streets safe and clean </p> </div> </div> "If we get this on the front end, we have less, then that's great because on the back end, we're still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to haul abandoned vehicles off the road."
According to DCS director Kim Hashiro, the number of abandoned vehicles as of May 2023 was declining by nearly half.
"Our abandoned vehicle rate has decreased significantly between the last few years and now, almost at a 50% rate," she said.
The bill has a tentative date of going into effect in January 2025, as long as the DMV is keen on updating information.
More >> https://ift.tt/D29MsKN Source: MAG NEWS
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