County to Consider Joining Abandoned Vehicle Fee Program

LOYALTON — A Loyalton City Council member asked the Sierra County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to join a state program that adds one dollar to every vehicle registration and spends the money hauling away abandoned vehicles. Supervisor Lee Adams said he supports the idea and would place it on a future agenda if his colleagues were willing to take it up.

Sue McIlravy made the request during public comment at the board’s regular meeting on Tuesday. Board rules bar supervisors from acting on or substantively discussing a matter that is not on the posted agenda, so no vote followed.

McIlravy handed supervisors copies of the material she had gathered on the Abandoned Vehicle Abatement program. She said the immediate prompt was a letter Loyalton received from the county’s Department of Environmental Health about an abandoned vehicle on Second Street, though she had been working on abandoned vehicles before it arrived. “This is an ongoing problem, and it’s not just for the city of Loyalton; it’s also for the county of Sierra, and every county is having this problem,” she said.

McIlravy’s objection is that Loyalton pays to remove vehicles it did not put on its streets. She described a vehicle left on a city street by a former resident and said the people who abandon them, not the city, should bear the cost. “It wasn’t the city of Loyalton that put that vehicle there,” she said. “But we have no way to go after these people.” She told supervisors the program could also pay to retrieve a vehicle she said has sat over an embankment for six months at County Line, before Bordertown.

Adams said he had tried to get the county into the program before. “In my past life when I was the county sheriff, I asked the board to participate in this. The board declined,” he said, adding that his recollection was that Loyalton residents opposed the dollar added to every vehicle. Adams was Sierra County’s sheriff-coroner from 1988 to 2007 and has represented District 1 since 2009. An agenda for a 2017 board meeting shows he raised the program a second time as a supervisor, in a discussion item noting that the fee would require a two-thirds vote of the board and approval by the Loyalton City Council.

Adams says he continues to support the program now. He counted five vehicles he owns, said the fee would cost him five dollars a year, and told McIlravy the arrangement spreads the cost among everyone who registers a vehicle in the county. “So I think it’s a great idea,” he said.

The program is set out in the California Vehicle Code. A county may create a service authority for the abatement of abandoned vehicles if its board of supervisors approves by a two-thirds vote and a majority of the cities holding a majority of the county’s incorporated population adopt matching resolutions. Loyalton is the only incorporated city in Sierra County, so a resolution from its five-member council would satisfy the city half of the requirement. The authority may then charge one dollar on each vehicle registered to an owner in the county, and two dollars more on commercial vehicles.

The Department of Motor Vehicles collects the fee with registration, keeps its administrative costs, and forwards the rest to a state trust fund, and the State Controller returns the money to each county’s authority in proportion to what that county’s fee brought in. The proceeds may be spent only on abating, removing, or disposing of abandoned, wrecked, dismantled, or inoperative vehicles as a public nuisance, and not on vehicles towed under other authority. The authority itself must be staffed by existing city, county, or transportation commission employees rather than new hires.

Before any money moves, the authority has to write a plan estimating how many abandoned vehicles are in the county, describing how it will enforce, tow, and dispose of them, and setting out fiscal controls. The county and the city approve the plan, the authority submits it to the California Highway Patrol by August 1, and the Highway Patrol either approves it or recommends changes by October 1 before it goes to the State Controller. Because the August 1 deadline falls in the year before a program operates, McIlravy told supervisors the fee likely would not reach registrations for several years. “I realize it’s not going to take effect until 2028 probably, but at least it’s a step forward in helping us attempt solving a problem,” she said.

Once running, an authority files a year-end report with the State Controller by October 31 each year, and a county that misses the deadline loses a year of funding. Participating agencies split the money under a formula that assigns half by each agency’s share of the vehicles abated and half by population and geographic area. The fee expires after 10 years unless the board and the city adopt resolutions extending it.

Sierra County and Loyalton already treat abandoned vehicles as a public nuisance, but neither ordinance provides funding. County code lets the county mail a notice of intention to abate, hold a hearing if one is requested, and charge removal costs through the tax collector; leaving a wrecked or inoperative vehicle in view for more than 60 days is a misdemeanor. Loyalton law also applies to streets and highways and sets the threshold at 15 days. The city ordinance limits what Loyalton can recoup: if the City Council finds a vehicle was left on a parcel without the landowner’s consent, it may not assess costs against that landowner.

The Highway Patrol counts 37 of California’s 58 counties in the program, and Sierra County is not on its member roster. Neighboring Nevada County does take part and reports that the dollar fee has been used to remove more than 2,000 vehicles from public property over the past five years. The Department of Motor Vehicles estimated 5,924 vehicles registered in Sierra County as of December 31, 2025, including 2,525 automobiles, 1,866 trucks, 1,324 trailers, and 209 motorcycles.