Old Cars Spur Complaints; Land Owner Says He’s Victim

In/Around Opportunity

Just beyond the trimmed hedges surrounding Garry Blank’s well-tended yard lies a small vacant lot cluttered with cars.

A windowless blue Isuzu and an old red Ford hardtop sit among overgrown grass on the northwest corner of Fourth and Pines.

“I’m having a fit,” Blank said. “It’s just a garbage lot.”

Workers at the Benis Veterinary Clinic across the street watch up to a dozen different vehicles park there every day.

The county inspected the property March 29 in response to a neighbor’s complaint and told the owner to clean it up.

Property owner Stephen Bishop says he’s trying his best, even though he isn’t to blame for the mess.

“I didn’t put those cars there,” he said.

Bishop, who lives elsewhere in the Valley, said that the two cars were illegally dumped. And other people use his property to temporarily display used vehicles that are for sale.

A manager at a nearby used car lot said neither the abandoned vehicles nor the cars temporarily parked there have anything to do with his business.

Eugene Wiltze, of Big Bobs Auto Sales, 410 S. Pines, said he doesn’t store vehicles there and he tells his customers not to park on Bishop’s property, although he admits they sometimes do.

Wiltze said that customers have in the past dropped off their trade-in vehicles on Bishop’s property. And an auto transport company sometimes uses the street right next to the vacant lot to unload vehicles, Wiltze said.

The manager of the apartment complex across the street from Bishop’s property said she’s given up on the mess.

“It’s terrible,” said Pattie Yurchak. She has picked up trash there herself.

“I think the property should be mowed and cleaned up,” said Blank, who has lived next to Bishop’s property for 27 years. “All this weed stuff all grown up is a fire hazard in August.”

Blank has complained to both the county and the fire department about the unkempt property. The lot has “cars, a davenport, garbage, and a partridge in a pear tree,” he said, wryly.

Another neighbor complained about the eyesore in early March, county zoning enforcement officer Allan deLaubenfels said.

But it didn’t take prodding from the county for Bishop to try to get rid of the unwelcome vehicles.

Last year, Bishop said, he found 11 cars and a boat parked on his property. He put letters on each vehicle warning that unless they were removed, he would tow them.

“I went by the next afternoon and they were gone,” he said.

But it wasn’t long before he found other cars parked on his property. Bishop said he has called the telephone numbers marked on the cars for sale and told those owners to remove them.

Bishop said he attempted to arrange last month for someone to haul off the two abandoned cars. But he was required to get a “hulk slip” from the Sheriff’s Department, granting him permission to move the abandoned vehicles.

The sheriff’s deputy who was helping Bishop at the lot was called away on an emergency, and Bishop hasn’t heard anything since.

“What I’ve got to do now,” Bishop said, “is try to contact the Sheriff’s (Department) and start over.”

Bishop said that if he could just have the cars towed, whoever has been parking the cars there would stop.

“That was my grandpa and grandma’s farm,” he said. “I hope to develop it someday.

“It’s not fair that I have to go through all the legal expenses,” Bishop said.

“People don’t have any business leaving cars for sale on (somebody else’s) property,” deLaubenfels said. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem fair.”

ILLUSTRATION: Photo