This text was produced for ProPublica’s Native Reporting Community in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror and initially printed in our Dispatches publication; sign up to obtain notes from our journalists.
In the summertime of 2022, a supply referred to as me with a tip about towing. “The main points of how this works,” he stated, “your head’s gonna spin.”
It seems Connecticut has a greater than 100-year-old regulation that permits tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they’ll persuade the Division of Motor Autos that the car is value $1,500 or much less.
The time-frame, we discovered by calling each state, is likely one of the shortest within the nation.
So I got down to reply what I believed was a easy query: What number of automobiles have towing corporations offered?
I submitted a request to the DMV below the Connecticut Freedom of Info Act.
Two-and-a-half years later, it appears the DMV doesn’t even know the reply — and we’re nonetheless ready for hundreds of information.
Within the fall of 2022, the DMV instructed me it could price us $47,000 to get the paperwork. Not solely did it sound just like the sticker worth for a brand new automobile, however I noticed we had been in for an extended struggle. (The DMV now says the estimate was an error.)
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We had sought one-page kinds referred to as H-100s that tow truck corporations should undergo the DMV to get permission to promote somebody’s automobile. These kinds might assist us discover out a whole lot of info — which corporations try to promote automobiles rapidly and what the DMV does with these requests.
Getting the paperwork was key to studying about towing practices in Connecticut and the true impression they’ve on individuals’s lives.
After asking the DMV to provide an itemized accounting of the $47,000 invoice, we requested our legal professional to attraction to the Freedom of Information Commission. Our legal professional negotiated a compromise in April 2023. We agreed to pay $1,900 to cowl the company’s prices of redacting hundreds of paperwork our request entailed.
The following month, we received our first group of kinds, and it lastly felt like we had been on our manner, till I opened the primary batch and noticed this:
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Along with being closely redacted, many kinds had been handwritten, and the DMV didn’t appear to have a database or a system for preserving observe of them. Company officers initially instructed us there have been 11,700 paperwork. Then they instructed us there have been greater than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they are saying there are about 4,100 for that 12 months. The DMV hasn’t been in a position to clarify the discrepancies. Officers additionally stated the request has taken time as a result of they must manually redact hundreds of paperwork.
The DMV’s gradual drip of offering the kinds made us must search for different methods to seek out individuals whose automobiles had been towed after which offered with out their consent.
My colleague Ginny Monk, who covers housing, had heard complaints from renters about tow truck corporations that had contracts with their condo complexes. Folks had been getting towed for not backing into their parking areas or failing to correctly show their parking stickers. Many individuals couldn’t get to the tow lot, which was no less than a half-hour away, and others simply didn’t have the cash to pay the charges.
Underneath the regulation, towing corporations should notify the native police inside two hours of eradicating a automobile. So we submitted public information requests to a number of police departments for his or her name logs.
We additionally requested incident experiences from the police division the place one tow lot was positioned and located dozens of complaints, most from individuals who stated they both couldn’t get their automobiles again or had been being overcharged.
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The police information additionally referenced DMV investigations into a few of the identical incidents. So we submitted a FOIA request to the DMV in February for investigations into a number of towing corporations. That took 4 months however gave us extra perception into the issue.
“It might be only a automobile to some,” Melissa Anderson of Hamden, Connecticut, wrote in her grievance, “however for my household it was sanity, peace of thoughts stolen from us.”
As we received nearer to publishing our story final fall, the DMV started to ship us extra kinds. We now have roughly 4,200. However the company’s lawyer has instructed us there are nonetheless hundreds extra it has but to show over.
Simply days after our story was printed, no less than two bills were introduced within the state legislature to handle a few of the points raised in our reporting. The DMV stated it could undertake a “complete overview” of towing practices, and the speaker of the Home promised that fixing the towing legal guidelines will likely be a “precedence” this legislative session.
We hope the curiosity generated by our story will induce the DMV to launch the remaining information quickly. In the meantime, in the event you’ve had your automobile towed in Connecticut, we hope you’ll take a while to fill out this questionnaire.
Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, contributed reporting.