A judge has struck down the latest effort by the city of Los Angeles to tow and destroy broken down recreational vehicles, handing a legal victory to a group of Westside homeless advocates.
In a two-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin said Los Angeles officials lack the legal authority to carry out a state law that permits the dismantling of abandoned or inoperable RVs in key parts of the state.
Assembly Bill 630 allows just two jurisdictions — Los Angeles and Alameda counties — to create programs for taking apart and ultimately discarding RVs that are worth up to $4,000, Kin said in Thursday’s ruling.
“AB 630 provides no such authority to the City of Los Angeles,” he wrote.
Los Angeles County government covers 10 million people. Los Angeles is one of 88 cities within the county.
AB 630, and the city’s effort to implement it, had been strongly opposed by advocates for homeless Angelenos, who said it would make it easier for the city to seize and destroy vehicles that serve as much-needed shelter for the city’s unhoused residents.
The state’s vehicle code currently requires that cities and counties sell impounded vehicles that are worth more than $500 at auction.
AB 630, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in October, increased the financial threshold for L.A. and Alameda counties, allowing them to dismantle vehicles worth up to $4,000. That, in turn, spares those jurisdictions from going through the more cumbersome process of auctioning off the vehicles, backers of the bill said.
An aide to City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto declined to comment on the judge’s decision, citing “pending litigation.” But City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents coastal neighborhoods, voiced dismay over the decision, calling it “another example of activist lawsuits impeding our ability to address urgent public health and safety concerns while moving people indoors.”
Park, whose district stretches from Los Angeles International Airport to Pacific Palisades, said inoperable RVs frequently pose a threat to public safety — attracting crime or resulting in the disposal of waste into storm drains and waterways.
“Residents are rightfully fed up. We cannot allow inoperable, abandoned vehicles to become a permanent fixture of our streetscape. Nor can we enable ‘vanlords’ to exploit the homeless,” she said in a statement.
Park said she is committed to working with state lawmakers to revise the law, which was sponsored by Mayor Karen Bass, so that it includes L.A.
The lawsuit was brought by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, which is made up of organizations and individuals who advocate for the “human and civil rights of unhoused and vehicularly housed people.” CD11 is shorthand for Council District 11, which is represented by Park.
The City Council voted 12-3 in December to instruct Feldstein Soto to “immediately” implement AB 630. The council also asked for a report within 30 days spelling out a strategy for “identifying, valuing, and processing abandoned recreational vehicles.”
Three council members — Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martínez — voted no.
The coalition filed its lawsuit a month later, accusing the city of “recklessly charging ahead” with a program it had no legal power to execute. Some of the coalition’s members live in RVs that could be seized and dismantled if the city is permitted to implement the law, the group said in its complaint.
Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents the CD11 coalition, said the council vote was part of a larger pattern of “doing politically expedient things that are patently illegal.” The judge’s ruling, she said, shows that the law was unambiguous — and that “county means county, not city.”
The CD11 Coalition “gave the city every opportunity to walk back the City Council’s illegal instruction, but the city attorney’s office continued to fight all the way to a final ruling, wasting taxpayer resources all along the way,” she said.
Assembly Member Mark Gonzalez, D-Los Angeles, said he is working on a new bill to ensure that all 88 cities within L.A. County can dispose of broken down RVs.
Gonzalez, who authored AB 630, also pushed back on the idea that the RV removal efforts would harm homeless residents. In an interview, he said a number of RVs in his Eastside district have been used for prostitution, drug dealing and other crimes.
“The goal was never to penalize an individual who’s unhoused,” he said. “The goal here is to get rid of those bad actors and get [homeless] folks the wraparound services they need.”
The post L.A. wanted to dismantle homeless RVs. A judge just shut that down appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
