The city of Santa Fe city is moving slowly on creating an automobile impound lot where police can store vehicles seized under still-unused anti-DWI rules adopted more than two years ago.

While Santa Fe County recently impounded its first car under its own DWI seizure law, passed during the same time period, the city has not been able to implement its ordinance, adopted in January 2007.

The city ordinance called for a driver charged with his or her third drunken-driving offense to lose the vehicle.

In May, the city acquired use of a 2-acre lot near the Police Department headquarters on Camino Entrada that it plans to fix up as a forfeiture lot and to hold cars as evidence in other investigations.

Three months from now, the city will have a design for securing and resurfacing the lot and should be able to hire a contractor for the job soon after that, said Chip Lilienthal, a public-works project manager. About $120,000 will be required for fences, cameras and other needed changes.

Police Capt. Anthony Robbin said in addition to the physical barriers that have kept the city from implementing the program, the city never established a fee structure for impound fees, storage fees or other costs associated with the lot's use. He said the city will need to amend the law.

"With no fees established for the program as of now, we would be spending money from our budget directly for the program and we would not get those fees back," he told city councilors at a Public Works Committee meeting.

Councilor Patti Bushee, who chairs the committee and who sponsored the vehicle-seizure measure in 2007, said Monday night that it was news to her that the right ordinances were not in place to make the rule work. At the time, she called its passage "the ultimate hammer."

"We are going on three years with this," she said Monday. "The county is enacting its ordinance. ... What is the holdup at this juncture?"

She asked the City Attorney's Office to immediately craft the appropriate amendments and said she wants to expand the impound provision to include offenders arrested on a second DWI charge instead of waiting for a third offense to invoke the provision.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.