New Haven Independent

The vehicles have all been apprehended over the last year for non-payment by their owners of state automobile taxes. They — the cars, not the owners — reside temporarily Friday, Saturday, and Monday, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the lots of the Greater New Haven Auto Auction at 51 Longhini Lane, just off Ella Grasso Boulevard.
The site is adjacent to the Longhini Sausage Company, with its picturesque Mr. Piggy, in top hat and cane, as if pointing the way to the forgotten autos. Sealed bids are being accepted until Monday at 4.
“You cannot believe what a pain this has been,” said Jerry Juliano, one of the state marshals who has executed the warrants, seized the vehicles, and helped to organize the auction. He and the other state marshal, Peter Criscuolo (they divide up town, with Juliano nabbing delinquent vehicles west of Church Street and Criscuolo doing the deed east going into Fair Haven), have seized the vehicles over the last month or so, but only, he says, after the state tax collector’s sense of leniency had been way over-taxed with letters and pleas to pay that have gone long unanswered.

“Most people ultimately respond to notices about unpaid taxes,” said Juliano. He genially described himself and Criscuolo as “the bad guys.” In fact, they are not. He and Criscuolo execute warrants on behalf of the state only as a last resort — some people are given more than a year to redeem their vehicles — and the cars to be auctioned represent only a small percentage of vehicles about which there were tax problems. Many hundreds of owners ultimately resolve their cases, which is why there just may not be that many pearls among the swine, as it were, out there on the lot. Good cars, said Juliano, those worth saving, get their taxes paid one way or another.

Kevin Stevens, general manager of the Greater New Haven Auto Auction (and the guy in the picture at top), put it more bluntly to your reporter who was among the early birds on the first icy day of the auction. “You can examine the cars to your heart’s content,” he said, but anything an owner lets get towed out of his driveway in the middle of the night is going to have problems. Many don’t have keys, so there will not be very much road testing.”

Juliano said, however, that the people at the auction house have indeed made up keys for a number of the better vehicles. The way it will work is that if you fall in love with a car, you make a sealed bid. A half hour after the end of the auction period, which is 4:30 on Monday, the bids are opened and if you win, you drive away in your car, assuming it has a key; more likely you had better make plans to tow it under your Christmas tree.

When cars are abandoned tax-wise, a daunting amount of paperwork must be prepared for each vehicle. The Department of Motor Vehicles has to notify lien holders, firmly establish title, and then give authorization. Then towers must be hired to relieve you of your automobile, the towers must store the vehicle, often for months while the DMV paperwork moves slowly, if inexorably, to seizure, and then arrangements made with the auction house.
“Nobody’s going to make much money on this,” said Juliano. “The minimum we can accept for a vehicle will be the amount due in delinquent taxes. So your bid is essentially paying back taxes. If more comes in for a vehicle, that will help us cover the auction house’s fee and then the towers’ fees. The towers are the guys who have been storing the vehicles for months; those are the guys who deserve to get some money back. Believe me, this is not only a pain, it’s the last thing we want to be doing.”
The Department of Motor Vehicles also requires that before a seized car can be auctioned off to the general public, it be on view for at least 24 hours. Stevens’s Greater New Haven Auto Auction, which usually only conducts sales for dealers in the trade, is closed to the general public normally, and is closed on Saturdays, has been obliging, keeping open this Saturday.
It will likely do so again next year, when, 75 or so more seized vehicles will go on the block on Longhini Lane in a second auction probably in the first weeks of 2006, when their paper work is complete.
State law requires only that notice of auction be posted at city hall, but the marshals have advertised in the local papers as well, and, weather permitting, they hope people will come.
Stevens said that Greater New Haven Auto Auction, which was established in 1991, has conducted similar auctions for the General Service Administration of the federal government, but this, the first for the City of New Haven, is, he thinks, a fine idea.
Juliano, for whom the auctions are the culmination of months of work he would prefer not to have done, begs to differ and for his part would be very happy not to see many more auctions of this kind for the rest of his life. “People should just pay their taxes!”