It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening on Main Street. A woman driving a sedan pulls a sharp U-turn in front of a group of 14 Santa Maria Police Department officers and various onlookers. She speeds off down Pine Street with orange safety cones lodged in the car’s wheel-well, and a patrol car soon tracks her down in an alleyway, discovering she tried to avoid the sobriety checkpoint ahead of her because she doesn’t have a license.
It’s just a half-hour into the department’s bi-monthly checkpoint operation, and she’s the sixth driver caught for the offense—and they’re only stopping every fifth car.
The steady stream of tow trucks hauling away vehicles is part of a crackdown on the city’s unlicensed and intoxicated drivers—a program that’s getting positive results, according to Cpl. Jesse Silva, head of the department’s traffic division.
“We’re busy out here, no doubt about it.” Silva says. “This is working for us. Every time we take a driver off the road, we save lives.”
At the top of the list
Local police and city officials say nabbing unlicensed drivers is the key to solving Santa Maria’s hit-and-run problem. The city is the hit-and-run capital of the state among similar-sized communities, according to the most recent traffic data released by the California Office of Traffic Safety.
The rankings, compiled from 2007 figures, compare Santa Maria with 105 other California cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. They’re based on average rates of motorists and pedestrians killed and injured in automobile accidents per 1,000 people and 1,000 miles of vehicle travel. Figures for 2008 are still being compiled by the agency.
Silva says the No. 1 ranking is indicative of the city’s large population of undocumented workers in comparison with rest of the Central Coast and elsewhere in the state.
“We’re an agricultural community in Santa Maria, and with that we have the influx of the migrant field-worker class,” Silva says. “Unfortunately, a lot of them do not have drivers’ licenses and a lot of them cannot obtain a license at all in the state of California.”
California has the highest overall hit-and-run fatality rates in the nation, according to the U.S. Transportation Department.
Another major factor in hit-and-runs is driving under the influence, according to Office of Traffic Safety spokesman Chris Cochran. In the agency’s rankings for that category, the city’s motorists don’t fare well either.
In fact, for its size, Santa Maria is ranked No. 1 in overall alcohol-involved injuries and deaths on roadways. It’s also No. 1 for traffic accidents involving 21-to-34 year old drivers who were drunk.
According to AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, people on foot run the greatest risk of getting hit. About 60 percent of hit-and-runs nationwide involve a pedestrian. In the rankings, Santa Maria is third in pedestrians younger than 15 killed or injured by motorists, and ninth in overall pedestrian casualties.
How to make safer streets
To help curtail Santa Maria’s traffic safety problems, the state’s Office of Traffic Safety and local police have come up with two solutions. One is the stationary license and DUI checkpoint, where two officers stop cars at random intervals, looking for signs of alcohol impairment and checking for valid drivers’ licenses.
The checkpoint locations change each time, but because they’re clearly marked and easily visible, Cochran says, they’re more successful at increasing public awareness of the dangers of driving under the influence than at actually catching drunk drivers.
“If we catch them, that’s fine, but it’s more to let people know that law enforcement is out there looking for DUIs and to hopefully have people not drive drunk in the first place,” Cochran says.
The other, and far more effective solution, is the mobile “saturation” patrol, in which more than 20 police officers scour the city looking for any probable cause to pull a car over—from cracked and dark-tinted windshields to drivers talking on cell phones or not wearing seatbelts.
The department conducts the patrols, which cost about $20,000 each, with yearly grants from the Office of Traffic Safety. Through Santa Barbara County’s DUI task force, comprised of a dozen local law enforcement agencies, the office requests periodic saturation patrols and checkpoints and sets the parameters on how they’re to be carried out. How often they’re conducted depends on how well the department can manage its grant money.
The Santa Maria department’s grants also allocate seven traffic officers for the city’s traffic bureau, who go out in pairs on a weekly basis for DUI enforcement. About twice a year, California Highway Patrol conducts its own DUI checkpoints from its Buellton office, including daytime checkpoints during wine festivals.
While the programs’ primary goal is to catch suspected intoxicated drivers, there’s an added benefit: curbing hit-and-run offenses. Santa Maria police say that thanks to the current Office of Traffic Safety grant—which ends Sept. 30—the agency has been able to ramp up efforts against unlicensed drivers, resulting in a 20 percent drop in hit-and-runs from this time last year.
In a single night in 2008, during a Nov. 16 saturation patrol, the Santa Maria Police Department impounded 147 vehicles from drivers who didn’t have a license. Another patrol in December netted 137 cars drivers who were unlicensed.
From the start of the grant period in October 2008 to March 1 of this year, the department impounded 866 vehicles for 30 days each. About 98 percent—848 of them—were impounded from motorists driving without a license. Checkpoints accounted for 159 of the impounded cars. The rest came from saturation patrols.
Connecting the dots
Santa Maria City Councilwoman Alice Patino says the numbers show the inherent connection between unlicensed drivers and hit-and-run offenses.
“If you look at the statistics where our hit-and-runs have gone down after picking up those cars, I think you can see what a big problem it is,” Patino says. “Our policemen have other things to do besides picking up after irresponsible people.”
According to Patino, the city’s unlicensed drivers are to blame for a strange phenomenon: disposable automobiles.
“With the hit-and-runs, usually the guy will hit somebody, jump out of the car, and run. So you have this car that is probably not registered to anyone and certainly isn’t insured,” Patino says. “Your best guess is that the driver doesn’t have a driver’s license, so we’re left with these cars that the only people they’re good for are those people who can dispose of them and don’t have to register or insure them.”
The police department reports that, at least four or five times a week, officers arrive at the scene of an accident only to find both cars empty, ditched by their drivers.
“We see it constantly,” Silva says. “People buy these cars, never get a license, and drive them until they either get caught, or wreck it. Then they just abandon them.”
Tow to tow
Local towing companies’ impound lots are full of such throwaway vehicles, according to Antonio Lopez, office manager of Four Corners Towing. That’s one of seven tow companies the Santa Maria Police Department uses for impounds.
“They’re not worth anything, so the driver isn’t going to stick around,” Lopez says of the cars. “They don’t have too much into them. They can just walk away.”
According to the Office of Traffic Safety’s Cochran, the office encourages impounding unlicensed drivers’ vehicles , but whether that actually happens or not is up to local police departments. In Santa Maria, vehicles are impounded for 30 days for a range of violations, including driving without a license, driving with tags expired more than six months, or if the car’s been reported stolen or wanted in a hit-and-run. If the driver is suspected of DUI, the car can also be impounded for a month. Impounded cars are towed away by local tow companies and housed at the respective company’s yard—the police department determines which company will handle the cars on a rotating basis.
Typically, a driver can retrieve the car after the month is up. Drivers must also pay all the necessary impound and storage fees, which can often be as high as $1,500. The driver must also show proof of registration, but because a vehicle’s owner doesn’t need a drivers’ license to register a car at the Department of Motor Vehicles, even people without licenses can get their cars back—provided they have a licensed driver with them at the time of pickup.
Many drivers either can’t afford the cost of retrieval or aren’t willing to pay more than their car is worth to get it from the lot. Those cars end up getting junked or sold by the tow companies, which begin a lien process after about 40 days on most cars. Vehicles are sold at auction or off the tow lot, usually for a fraction of the impound fees or what’s owed on the vehicle.
According to Councilwoman Patino, since having a license isn’t a requirement to buy a vehicle at a lien sale, the buyers are often the same people who’ve already lost a car to the impound lot.
“We have a big cycle there that just keeps going round and round,” she says. “It’s not fair to the public to have to endure dealing with the same problem vehicles.”
According to statistics compiled by the city’s combined tow-truck companies, an average of 523 cars are impounded in the city each month. Only about a third of those will be reclaimed by their registered owners. Another third will be resold, and the rest are crushed.
Four Corners Towing’s Lopez, whose lot has the capacity to hold 350 cars, says 30 to 40 percent of his inventory will eventually go to sale.
“For every vehicle that we sell at auction, there’s maybe two or three that are just not worth anything and goes to junk, and we lose on them,” he says.
As it stands now, the tow-truck companies make all the money from the lien sale of each vehicle, while the city collects a small fee on each impound. But that could all change, if the city has its way.
A lot to say
The city of Santa Maria wants to build a city-owned impound yard, a move that tow-truck owners and operators fear will put them out of business. City officials say they want the lot in order to keep the repeat-offending “junker” cars from passing around like a hot potato.
Patino, who expects a cooperative impound lot proposal from local towing companies in a couple of weeks, says the issue is both a public safety and a crime concern.
“We can crush the cars so we don’t have to deal with those particular cars anymore,” she says. “But more importantly, if the car is involved in some kind of an accident where the police have to keep it in a secure location, they can have it in a place where it’s always secure.”
If the city goes ahead with its own impound yard, Lopez says, the tow-truck companies stand to lose 80 percent of their revenue and more than half of their combined workforce. He said he hopes that tow companies and the city can work together to come to an agreement that benefits both sides.
“We’re pushing for the public to be notified that this is going to cost $2.5 million when current services are already being provided for,” Lopez says. “That’s going to be a lot of money being spent on a yard that really isn’t needed.”
Ultimately, he says, a city-owned lot would do little to remedy the problem of unlicensed drivers getting behind the wheel of a junk vehicle.
“There’s going to be an influx of cars coming in to Santa Maria,” he says. “They’re going to buy them. You can go into any dealership, and you don’t need a license.”
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 2, 2009.