Here’s how you can lose your car to a towing company and what city’s doing to stop it
So far, the Wichita City Council has done the right thing when it comes to tow trucks.
On Wednesday, they’ll have a chance to keep on doing it.
Twice in the last three weeks, the council majority has turned down a towing contract for the Police Department that would have cost citizens too much and resulted in too many cars being sold at auction, because their owners couldn’t afford to get them out of impound.
As things stand now, if you’re poor and don’t have a few hundred in walking-around money, you may as well kiss Ole Betsy goodbye.
This isn’t just about parking scofflaws or drunk drivers. There are a lot of reasons in city code that your car could wind up impounded:
▪ If your car breaks down on the side of the street and you don’t have the money to fix it immediately.
▪ If you get arrested while driving, even if you’re never charged with a crime or are found innocent, you still have to pay towing and storage fees for the time your vehicle’s in car jail.
▪ If you’re in an accident and are hurt or the car’s not drivable.
▪ If your car isn’t moved every 48 hours to another block or different side of the street.
I almost got racked up for that last one myself one time.
My son was home from college and parking, legally, on the street behind the house. He was working a summer job at the local Dillons, went to work each day and came home and parked in the same place.
Someone didn’t like that, called it in as just sitting there, and I got a notice pasted to the window that it would be impounded if it wasn’t moved, pronto. Fortunately, I was able to chase down the officer who’d stickered our car, explained the situation and that was the end of it.
The rates being charged for police tows are already way above market prices and the current proposal, being negotiated with nine tow truck companies, will only make matters worse.
The minimum tow charge under the proposed contract, for just hooking a car to the tow truck, would go up from $105 to $120 if the car is upright on four wheels.
If you’re just ordinary Joe or Jane off the street, these same companies would tow your car for $75 to $90 from anywhere in Wichita to anywhere in Wichita.
It kind of undercuts the argument by the tow company’s lobbyist, former council member Greg Ferris, who swears up and down that these companies can’t make money unless they get what they’re demanding from the city.
The real hit is storage fees, scheduled to go up from $30 a day to $35. Plus a $30 “lot fee” to the tow company and a $30 processing fee to the city.
Let’s do math.
At 30 days, the point at which the tow company gets to auction your car and keep the money, that’s at least $1,230 to get your car back, counting towing and storage fees.
Last year, police tows accounted for 1,710 vehicles removed from the streets. Of those, 631 never got back to their owners.
They were auctioned off for $663,000, with $583,000 going to towing vendors and $80,000 to the city.
Some of these cars are abandoned and nobody wants them. Fine, sell those for scrap.
But a lot of these low-end cars are people’s lifeline to get to and from low-paying jobs and they shouldn’t lose them for their inability to pay an inflated towing charge.
Mayor Brandon Whipple has proposed an innovative if partial solution: have the city pay the towing and storage fees for residents who can’t afford to get their car out of the pound, and then let the car owner pay it back on payments like they can with traffic tickets.
It’s good start. Here’s hoping that the council approves it at their special meeting at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
And City Manager Robert Layton has promised to use the next year to try to come up with a way to bring down the costs to car owners and still meet the city’s need to remove problem vehicles.
Here’s hoping he succeeds.
This story was originally published May 24, 2022 at 3:35 PM.
