While we all probably have a story of an egregious parking job that fully justified calling a tow truck, most cars aren’t towed because some rando blocked a pregnant woman’s driveway right before she tried to leave for the hospital. It can happen for much more minor reasons such as simply misreading a sign. If you don’t have a lot of extra money lying around, that can be a problem, but it can be an even bigger problem if you live in Connecticut and own too cheap of a car because they can sell it after 15 days, ProPublica reports.
The problem with Connecticut’s law is two-fold. First, 15 days is one of the shortest in the U.S., with only North Carolina and Iowa allowing towing companies to sell cars more quickly. For comparison, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island won’t let a towing company sell your car for at least 60 days. The second issue is that the 15-day rule only applies to cars that the towing company claims are worth $1,500 or less.
So basically, screw the poor people. They don’t need cars, do they? That’s what the wildly underfunded and unreliable bus system is for—punishment for not being able to afford a nicer car.
ProPublica recently partnered with the Connecticut Mirror to investigate the state’s sketchy towing laws, and what it found was a whole lot of people who found themselves on the wrong side of their apartment complexes and no record of the money from those sales ever being turned over to the state even though that’s required by law:
The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica reviewed thousands of the forms that towers submit requesting the DMV’s permission to sell people’s cars. Many cases didn’t start with parking tickets, accidents or police involvement. Instead, people were towed for breaking parking rules at their apartment complexes.
Towing and storage charges can quickly add up to several hundred dollars. And once cars are hauled away, some tow companies make it harder for people to get their cars back. Some only take cash. Others refuse to release cars unless they’re registered in the person’s name — even if that person had recently bought the vehicle and wasn’t required to register it yet.
In some cases, the 15-day window can be shorter than the time it takes to get a registration appointment at the DMV. And it’s far shorter than it takes for a complaint to be heard challenging the legitimacy of a tow.
When cars are sold, the owners are again at a disadvantage. Under Connecticut law, tow companies are required to hold on to the proceeds for one year so owners can claim the money. After that, tow companies are supposed to subtract their storage fees and turn over any remaining funds to the state. But the DMV has never established a process for towers to submit the money, and the state treasurer’s office said it has no record of receiving any money from the sale of a towed car.
Conveniently, the explanation for why one towing company has never turned over any money to the state is that no car has ever sold for more than the cost of the towing and storage fees the company is allowed to deduct from the sale price. Funny how that works. The fees are always higher than the value of the car.
When the Mirror tried to get to the bottom of how many residents are affected by this system of punishing poor people, they ran into issues getting the Department of Motor Vehicles to cooperate. More than two-and-a-half years after submitting the initial Freedom of Information Act request, the DMV still hasn’t given the Mirror all of the requested files. The agency also initially claimed that fulfilling the request would cost $47,000, but backed off once a lawyer got involved.
While the system is sketchy, it’s not like the state of Connecticut decided to simply trust towing companies not to undervalue the cars they sell. After all, if the car is worth more than $1,500, they have to wait 45 days to sell it. When a company submits an application to sell a towed car, the agent reviewing the application is supposed to record the car’s book value. If that value differs significantly from the auction estimate, towing companies may be required to submit additional documentation proving they didn’t undervalue the car.
Additionally, DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera defended the law, saying it “strikes the right balance for consumers and towers,” while making sure cars don’t “remain on a tow company’s property for months, amassing large storage charges.”
While some of the cars sold after 15 days aren’t in running condition, as you can imagine, the owners of the cars that do have to deal with far-reaching consequences. And when the system is abused, the people who say they were victimized often have a hard time getting the DMV to address their complaints:
After her Dodge Neon was towed, Anderson pleaded with MyHoopty to release her car. She told them she had the bill of sale, title and proof of insurance and was going to the DMV in two days. But Anderson said Festa told her it wasn’t his problem; he wouldn’t release the car until it was registered.
This is where low-income people can get trapped. The law says that tow companies shall release vehicles to their owners once the fees have been paid and they present proof of registration. But there’s another law that seems to conflict with that: The DMV allows up to three months for drivers to register vehicles purchased out of state. And for private sales in Connecticut, the DMV says there is no deadline. So people can still run into problems even if they follow DMV rules.
Because Anderson bought her car in a private sale, she didn’t receive the temporary license plates usually provided by car dealers. She instead had to make an appointment at the DMV, which at the time took weeks to get, or go to an authorized dealer, which costs extra.
Plus, it was difficult for Anderson to get to MyHoopty’s lot, which was a 40-minute drive from her apartment. She said, one day, a person who answered the phone told her, “You’re wasting your time coming down here anyway, with all the fees and everything, you ain’t getting your car back, sweetheart.”
Anderson said her husband lost his job shortly after the car was towed because he couldn’t always get rides and it took more than an hour on multiple buses to get from Hamden to the restaurant he worked at in Milford.
To make matters worse, Anderson said, in the car were all of her husband’s chef tools, including knives he had been given in culinary school, which he estimates were worth more than $1,000.
The good news is, State Rep. Roland Lemar, co-chair of the legislature’s Transportation Committee has said the committee needs to reconsider the law in the next legislative session. “There are obvious abuses happening to residents across Connecticut, and those impacted are folks with lower economic means who can’t possibly be expected to access that amount of cash in such a quick time frame,” he told ProPublica. “There needs to be reform within the DMV, but I think there’s also clear and obvious consumer protection issues.”
It’s not clear what steps the legislature may take, but hopefully, the rules can be straightened out in a way that allows towing companies to avoid storing junk cars for excessive periods of time without also making it almost impossible for low-income residents to ever get their towed cars back. There’s also so much more to this story than would ever be right to summarize here, so head on over to ProPublica to give the whole investigation a read.
