CPEC's City-Scan program was featured in the Hartford Advocate's article "Calvalcade of Abandon Cars:  Abandoned cars clutter the streets and properties of Hartford. What´s the city doing about it? "

From the article:

Typically, abandoned cars will come to the attention of the Health and Human Services Department and the police when people call their offices. But City Scan Hartford, a project begun in 2000 by the Connecticut Policy and Economic Council (CPEC), actively seeks out abandoned cars.

City Scan Hartford employs residents and high school students to survey neighborhoods, collecting data and mapping out stressed sections of the city. City Scan also operates in Bridgeport, Danbury, Norwalk, Stamford and New Britain, as well as Des Moines, Iowa, according to the organization's website.

"Some of what we found would contradict a lot of people's notions about the city. An unbelievable amount of abandoned cars were found in Blue Hills," City Scan program manager Sean Ghio said.

I walked around the Blue Hills neighborhood on Aug. 4 with three City Scan employees, high school students Ashanti Green, Mark Cooper and Althea Levy, and their director, recent University of Connecticut graduate Stephanie Nadler. They do surveys three times a week, starting at 8:30 and ending four hours later, weather permitting (the day I joined them, the survey was called somewhat because of the heat).

Wearing T-shirts that read, "Neighborhood Survey Team," the students scour the city, block by block, with maps, a video camera and handheld computers recording their findings.

The day was almost unbearably hot, but the team made its paces through Blue Hills fairly cheerfully, if somewhat slowly. The boys, Ashanti and Mark, talked about what sort of cars and songs they liked. Walking through a block on Pembroke Avenue, they found four abandoned cars on private property.

The street was typical. Cooper said the team spots abandoned cars "pretty much every day."

Careful to stay off of private property, they looked for cars with deflated tires, expired registration stickers and other signs of general distress. Althea, who carried the video camera and walked a couple of paces ahead of the group, logged one car because it had an outdated dark blue Connecticut license plate, which are no longer in use.

Aside from one woman who objected to our parked cars in front of her home -- it was trash collection day -- the survey went without incident. Other days, the team said, have been more exciting.

"Plenty of times people come out and ask all sorts of questions," Green said. Nadler added that the police have been called on them, and dogs are a constant concern.

In several instances they gave suspect-looking cars a pass, saying that they looked like the owners were working on them, and the cars didn't seem to pose a danger.

According to a cost benefit analysis report that resulted from a senior seminar in public finance at Trinity College taught by Suzanne Gleason in 2004, clearing the city of abandoned cars should be one of Hartford's top priorities.

Based on data from City Scan's 2004 survey, the class determined that solving the city's abandoned car issue would be the most executable and cost-effective way of "remedying different neighborhood ailments in Hartford."

The report notes that the city is paid $10 by the towing company for every car it takes (Jim Corona said he couldn't confirm that amount, nor could McKoy), and that long-term benefits such as reducing crime and attracting more merchants to a cleaned-up area, could also result.

Compared with the other issues the class looked at, such as abandoned buildings, graffiti and overgrown, empty lots, cars could be dealt with the easiest. And the danger presented to the public by abandoned cars was on par with that of the abandoned buildings and the overgrown lots.