local police dept. asked me if i wanted some old theft recovered bikes, so i said yes of course, ended up with 60 bikes in my garage

There HAS to be more to the story...

well, im a firefighter here in town and the building that the bikes were in kept getting broke into, in the past they always auctioned the bikes off but with budget cuts they were not doing anything with them, i expressed my interest in them and the mayor told me i could have em. thats the whole story.

So.... Co-op startup ?

Where, pray tell, do you live? If it's anywhere near me I'm going to complain!

Any gems?

The little wife must be ecstatic

no gems, there was one that i never heard of before, a bca hybrid bike, kinda cool, most are walmart type bikes. 75% are getting stripped down for parts, lotsa nice 26'' aluminum rims. about 10 bikes worth fixxing up. now maddox why would you complain?

wife has no problem with it, as long as she can park her car in it shes fine, its my jeep that has to stay outside. i do alot of local bike repairs in my town on my days off from the fire dept. closest bike shop around is 30 miles.

After stripping them, don't rule out bringing what you don't need to a scrap metal yard. The metal will get recycled into new products, and you might get a few bucks.

Is the BCA hybrid a mixte with mountain bike wheels?

How come they don't give them back to the owners?

I'd say you have enough bikes for a giant sloar.

Most of the time police cannot locate the owners and many are never even reported stolen. It's not like a car with registration.

How do they know that they're stolen? (sorry, kind of a lame question but I've always wondered about those police auction bikes).

Suggestion: Start an Earn a Bike organization.
Wheels for Winners offers bikes to youth in my community who perform 15 hours of community service or volunteer work. We take donated bikes, repair them, and offer them as 'rewards' for their volunteering. They also get a helmet and lock.
Most of the bikes we get are xmart bikes but we fix them up good.
All volunteer all non-profit, all grant funded

There are a couple of places where I live people have 60 to 100 bikes maybe more, and their all basically Walmart type of bikes, they simply clean up do some simple repairs and sell them out of their homes. Not sure how they get these bikes though.

But you could do a non-profit thing and donate the bikes to needy kids, or teach the parents the value of money and sell them to needy kids but sell them cheap like $5 just to try to recoup cost of tires and other expenses incurred. You might be able to get grant money if you know a good grant writer if you do the donation thing.

Weld them all together in a giant heap and call it art.