"Don't throw the past away;

you might need it some rainy day! Dreams can come true again -

when everything old is new again!"

I thought of the song last week, when Philly police announced that dispatchers would no longer announce news of traffic accidents over police-radio airwaves. Instead, they would relay word via electronic messages sent to laptop computers in officers' cars.

The goal? To keep wreck-chasing tow-truck operators from listening to police scanners and descending on crash sites, before cops get there, and bullying drivers into signing over towing rights to the smashed cars.

The wreck-chasers have been using the scanners to circumvent what is supposed to be fair assigning of registered towing operators to disabled vehicles.

(Emphasis on "supposed to." Exhibit A: In the two years that AAA-MidAtlantic has had towing operators on the city's joke of a rotation list, it said that

it has received just one call from police for a tow - and that's out of 4,392 accidents in 2009 alone. A free pizza to anyone who can explain that corrupt math.)

The change was suggested by Councilman Frank Rizzo, who told the Inquirer, "This pulls the plug on their ability to get information."

This is where Granma Veronica, if she were alive, might break into song. Because Rizzo made the same suggestion eight years ago, when he worked with police in Northwest Philly to break up wreck-chaser wars there.

The embargo, limited to the Northwest, worked while it was in place, he told me yesterday. But it was eventually abandoned, during a change in police leadership.

"I think there might have been pressure from owners of auto- body shops," he says.

Nothing like caving in to those who make a living exploiting the bloodied and vulnerable.

This time around, the accident-news blackout is citywide and has the support of Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who approved the idea within hours of Rizzo's suggesting it to Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Gaittens, Rizzo says.

"This should take care of the problem," says the councilman.

Until, of course, some enterprising cop or dispatcher alerts tow-truck buddies, for a fee, of a juicy new wreck in need of an expensive tow. Because - c'mon - this is Philly.

But God bless Rizzo for trying. When it comes to towing reforms, the poor man has pounded his head against the wall so often, he could sell it for cheap as a scratch-and-dent.

In 2005, after two years of wrangling, he led Council's successful passage of an ordinance to set up the rotational towing system. It took until 2008 to implement the damn thing - which has been circumvented ever since by wreck-chasers with police scanners or in cahoots with God-knows-who to devise ways to hose the public.

Councilman Jim Kenney has been as relentless as Rizzo when it comes to tow-truck reforms, which are - woe to accident victims - never enforced to the degree they need to be.

Since 1992, he's pushed legislation that caps towing fees, forbids towing operators to stipulate "cash only" payment of fees and services, and makes it illegal to tow from private property any vehicle that has not already been ticketed by police.

Again, not that enough towing operators give a damn.

A 2009 report by City Controller Alan Butkovitz analyzed a three-month period in 2008 during which eight towing operators conducted 84 percent of all police-requested tows.

In contempt of the law, all overcharged and/or advertised cash-only payments.

Unsurprisingly, some of those operators weren't even properly licensed. That's one reason yesterday Kenney called for a suspension of the city's tow-truck rotation until the licensing status of all 96 companies on the list can be reviewed.

The process could take "a month or two," he says, during which towing jobs would be handled by the nine "vetted operators" who hold contracts with the city to recover stolen vehicles.

No doubt there are other Philly towing operators who've never generated ill will, either, and they're feeling the unfairness of being slimed - as they have been for decades - with the same oily brush.

This latest sliming isn't new, my Granma would note.

It just feels that way.

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ ronnieblog.