Photo by Deb Gau Sgt. Ryan Hoffmann of the Marshall Police Department said law enforcement recovers dozens of abandoned bicycles every year. MPD stores bikes for at least 90 days, but if they can't find an owner, the bikes may eventually end up scrapped.

MARSHALL — Each summer, the Marshall Police Department gets calls about abandoned bicycles. Over the course of a year, the recovered bikes start to add up.

About 50 bikes – mainly ones that were found abandoned, said Marshall Public Safety Director Jim Marshall – were lined up in city storage Tuesday morning.

“It’s really not that many for us,” Marshall said. “We’ve had more in the past.”

While MPD keeps found bikes for at least 90 days, they eventually have to do something with them. As part of the Marshall City Council’s consent agenda for Tuesday, the council would consider giving MPD permission to declare the bicycles as surplus property. Marshall said the bikes would be donated or scrapped.

“This is part of the reason we encourage people to register their bikes,” Marshall said.

When people register their bikes with Marshall Police, law enforcement have a way to identify a stolen or lost bicycle and bring it back to its owner.

“We’d much rather take them back to where they belong than leave them here,” he said.

Agenda materials for Tuesday’s Marshall City Council meeting said the bicycles to be declared as surplus property were ones that had been abandoned, or that had been seized by police. Marshall said there haven’t been many times that law enforcement seized a bicycle. The bikes in city storage were mainly ones that had been found abandoned and that an owner couldn’t be identified for.

Some of the bikes currently in storage have been there since last year. But MPD doesn’t keep bikes forever.

“We have to have the storage space for it,” Marshall said.

Once they were declared surplus property, the bikes would mostly be taken to Alter Metal Recycling for disposal, Marshall said. With bikes that are still in good condition, MPD sometimes works with Marshall Public Schools to find families in need that they can donate the bike to.

Marshall said the MPD’s bike registration program has helped cut down on the number of abandoned bike calls the department receives. People who are interested in registering their bikes can go to the Marshall Law Enforcement Center during regular business hours.