MANCHESTER, NH – Over the past three to four years, 32 mobile homes and trailers abandoned on city streets have been towed and stored at the transfer station on Dunbarton Road.
“We need to get rid of them,” Police Chief Peter Marr told aldermanic board members Tuesday in requesting $55,000 to hire a company to remove and/or dismantle the aged recreational vehicles. “It looks like a trailer park up there. This happens with the influx of the homeless problem we’ve been dealing with for several years. These are abandoned vehicles.”
On Thursday, a Manchester Ink Link reporter took a tour of the transfer station at 500 Dunbarton Road. Supervisor Todd, who declined to give his last name, said the police asked if it could “temporarily” stow some abandoned mobile homes at the transfer station.
“That was three years ago,” Todd said. In the upper right corner at the site are about a half-dozen RVs in varying states of disrepair. Across the road, at the capped landfill, there are five rows of parked RVs; all were abandoned on city streets.
“It’s a liability if somebody breaks in on the property and gets hurt in there,” Todd said. “It’s an issue if anything leaks out of them because it can get into the water supply.”
Todd said the vehicles were pulled off city streets, sometimes during snow emergencies. He said the vehicles were used by the homeless and sometimes by drug dealers providing mobile delivery service.
Marr told the aldermen sometimes tow companies will take abandoned cars because they can be “scrapped for parts and they can make money on them.”
That’s not the case with the recreational vehicles.
The campers, he explained, incur a great cost.
“They take up a lot of space in tow yards,” Marr said. “Most tow yards are pretty small – a ½ acre to ¾ of an acre. So we’re stuck with 32 of these things right now and we need to get rid of them.”
He said the actual cost is $49,000 but he is asking for an additional $6,000 in the event there are more costs in disposing of them.
Any funds not used would be returned to the general fund. However, Marr said the police department would like to keep that money to create a fund to be used in future cases.
In response to a question from Alderman Bill Barry, Marr said for some of the abandoned vehicles, police were able to track down the owners and have them pick up their camper.
Others, however, were never registered by people who brought them to Manchester. “There’s no way to track down who had them,” he said.
The board approved the funds.