LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- At Duke Truax's car lot near Elizabethtown, some of the used cars currently for sale almost look brand new.
"Very, very nice vehicle. Leather seats. Folded floor mats," he said Monday, as he showed WDRB News one of them. "I mean, the works. You name it, it has it."
Truax is a doctor of sorts, and he finds his patients — the cars — in an unlikely place: the LMPD Vehicle Impoundment Unit on Frankfort Avenue, where wrecked and abandoned cars are towed.
There, Truax and others bid on the unclaimed cars in auctions that have transitioned online during COVID-19. Truax says he'll buy some for resale. While some require thousands of dollars of work, others require much less. He says he'll also buy some to resell their parts.
"You know, your 2012 and up cars that are wrecked, they have a lot of high-dollar parts, high dollar transmissions, engines, doors," he said.
However, Truax says, lately, the volume of cars sent to auction has lessened, and the city is sending more of them to a scrap yard to be recycled.
Truax estimates the city is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a result.
Duke Truax. (WDRB Photo)
"There (are) some vehicles that are generally scrap, and I agree with that, but the ones they're scrapping are not scrap," he argued. "When you lose revenue, you lose funding for, I mean, anything from new equipment for police officers, sidewalks, highways."
LMPD Maj. Dave Allen, who helps manage the impound lot, has a different take.
"I would definitely push back that we're losing a lot — a vast amount of money on taking cars to the scrap yard," he said.
Allen says the impound lot is run efficiently and is still committed to auctioning some of the cars to private buyers. But he says the lot must also scrap some of the cars considered to be in poor shape to free up space for new cars in an already crowded lot.
"To me, what's most important is not how much money came in for a vehicle," Allen said. "What matters to me is were we able to move a wrecked vehicle away from an intersection or a vehicle that was abandoned on the side of the road and became a safety hazard."
The towing of abandoned vehicles was paused last year in mid-March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but after an "unacceptable" number of abandoned vehicles were left along roads and in neighborhoods, the towing restarted last summer. Allen says that effort, combined with some of the recycling, has helped the city make a sizeable dent in the problem.
A car is towed from the LMPD Vehicle Impoundment Unit. (WDRB Photo)
Meanwhile, Councilman James Peden, R-23, would like to believe the impound lot is run well, but he says the proof he's asked for hasn't been provided to him.
"I'm not saying they're not doing a good job," he said. "I'm just saying I haven't been able to get the information I want."
Particularly, Peden would like to see data that displays trends in weekly vehicle auctions. He'd also would like to see an itemized spreadsheet that identifies which cars the impound lot has received, which cars are then scrapped and how much the city earns when they are scrapped.
"I just want to know where the oversight is," Peden said. "That's kind of my concern at this point."
Wednesday, Maj. Allen confirmed that data does exist but didn't have any numbers immediately available.
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