Despite a series of reforms passed last year to curb the practices of towing companies, more needs to be done to protect consumers whose cars are at risk of being removed and potentially sold, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles said Tuesday.
DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera has outlined five recommendations he plans to submit to the Legislature during its session that begins in February. The recommendations follow a Connecticut Mirror And ProPublica investigation which exposed how state law for decades favored towing companies over low-income consumers. They also follow months of meetings with a group of industry and consumer representatives.
The recommendations would require towing companies to make more of an effort to notify owners that their cars have been towed and to streamline the process by which companies can sell unclaimed vehicles.
The commissioner announced his proposal at the last scheduled meeting of a working group made up of towing and consumer representatives. The group was created as part of a towing reform law passed last year after news organizations showed how towing companies were seeking DMV permission to sell certain cars after just 15 days, one of the shortest deadlines in the country. Many low-income residents have been towed for minor violations, sometimes from their own apartment complex, only to lose their cars when they could not afford to get it back before it was sold.
If the legislature adopts the recommendations, towing companies will no longer assign a value to the vehicles they tow, which now determines whether a tower can start the sales process in 15 days or 45 days. Instead, all cars would be sold at public auction after 30 days, Guerrera said.
Other recommendations include requiring towing companies to send two letters to the registered owner of the vehicle after it is towed, one certified and one not. If the car is unclaimed, the tours will need to send a third letter to the owner after 30 days to inform them of the date and location of the auction. Towing companies would be required to either advertise the auctions on their websites or post legal notices in local newspapers.
The DMV would also be required to create a portal on its website listing every car towed so people can find out which tower owns their vehicle, when it was towed and when the auction will take place.
If a vehicle receives no offers and the car owner comes forward, the towing company will be required to offer the car to them, regardless of its costs, before selling it for scrap.
There was little resistance from industry leaders or consumer advocates Tuesday, even though towing representatives had previously complained that the changes would increase costs and consumer advocates had objected that the recommendations did not go far enough to protect drivers.
The proposal also failed to address the initial task that lawmakers assigned to the group: how to manage profits from towed car sales. Currently, towing companies are supposed to keep profits for a year so owners or lenders can claim them. After that, all unclaimed funds, minus towing fees, must be turned over to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found that didn’t happen in part because the DMV never had a system in place to collect the money.
Guerrera said after the meeting that the DMV has a process in place to verify whether towing companies are remitting funds to the state. He said they wouldn’t know if the system was working until October because money from towed car sales had to be held back for a year.
After Guerrera finished presenting his proposal, Eileen Colonese, secretary of the industry group Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said Guerrera’s plan does not address a key problem: The last registered owner of the vehicle is not necessarily the owner when it is towed.
“I continue to believe that until the state of Connecticut has a process in place to determine who actually owns the vehicles, everything we’re doing is pretty absurd because we’re still not notifying the current owner of the vehicle,” Colonese said.
Consumer rights advocate and attorney Raphael Podolsky said Guerrera’s recommendations are a “step in the right direction, but there are still a lot of problems that need to be addressed until the system is fixed.”
Guerrera said his plan was “inspired” by discussions at the committee’s four previous meetings. He said he hopes the portal on the state website will also help DMV staff better track what towing companies are doing with vehicles.
Under the revised law, which took effect Oct. 1, towing companies must now warn people before removing vehicles from apartment parking lots unless there is a safety concern. They also have to accept credit cards, let people pick up their stuff, and be available on weekends for people to pick up their cars. And while the sales process can begin after 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500, tours must wait 30 days before selling them.
Guerrera said he hopes the task force will continue to meet.
“I want to have ongoing meetings, whether it’s quarterly or twice a quarter, to try to pin down issues that arise or need to be addressed so we can create a system that works for everyone,” Guerrera said.
