A little-known law in Connecticut allows towing companies to sell the cars they’ve towed after only 15 days. It’s hurting low-income residents. WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Dave Altimari to discuss his article written with Ginny Monk and Haru Coryne of ProPublica, “Gone in 15 days: How the Connecticut DMV allows tow companies to sell people’s cars,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read their story here. WSHU: Hello, Dave. Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country for tow companies to sell cars. What prompted you and your colleagues to partner with ProPublica to investigate this? What did you find? DA: Yes, actually, it was over two years ago when a source called me and said, You’re not going to believe this, but in Connecticut, they can tow your car, and 15 days later, they can ask the Department of Motor Vehicles for permission to sell it. So when we looked up the law, which is over 100 years old, it was initially supposed to be to help deal with abandoned motor vehicles on the highway or municipal roads, but it has turned into a vehicle for these towers, they call them trespass towers or private property towers. After 15 days, the DMV permits them to do so. It’s like a temporary registration, and then they can sell the car. WSHU: We’re talking about a situation like parking in the wrong place in an apartment building lot. DA: Yes, this is not for, you know, you were parked in a handicap spot or at a supermarket. This is private apartment complexes, where the apartment managers make the rules, and what’s happening is, you know, there are a lot of places if you don’t back your car in, for example, to your parking space, they’ll tow your car. If your parking pass isn’t visible in a certain spot in a car, if it happens to fall on the ground, they’ll tow your car. And a lot of them, what they do is they have these portable scanners, and they can scan the license plate. They can tell who the car is registered to or supposed to be registered to, and if that’s not a person who’s supposed to be there, then the car is not, technically, properly registered. WSHU: You have a specific case that you focused on, Melissa Anderson. DA: We focused on one couple in particular. Melissa was an interesting case because she had purchased her car, her ex husband had done some work on it for her so she could register her car. This was back in 2021, so while we were still in the throes of COVID and she couldn’t get an appointment with the DMV, you can only do it online at the time, and she couldn’t get an appointment to get the car registered for like, six weeks. And if you buy a car, by private purchase, the law is, you know, if you buy a car from a dealer, the dealer takes care of it for you. If you buy a car from somebody from New York, you have 90 days to register your car, so you have a little more time. But if you buy a car privately, there’s really no time frame, so you need to get an appointment and back, certainly back then, even now, I believe it’s like it’s several weeks now, at least more than 15 days, if you were to try to do it today. So she had an appointment two days away, and her car was towed on a Saturday morning, and she never got it back. She had spent a lot of money. Her husband worked at a restaurant. He was a chef. They had a child, an autistic child, so they just couldn’t afford the fees and she eventually, exactly 15 days after they towed her car, the company filed the paperwork with the Department of Motor Vehicles to get permission to sell her car. And they ended up junking her car, which actually made it worse, because they junked the car and got like half of what she paid for it. And she had just had the car, her ex husband had done quite a bit of work on the car, so the car was not junk. So I was kind of like a double thing, where not only did you lose her car, but they got rid of it, and that car certainly could have, could have run for many more years. WSHU: Now, the company that towed her car, MyHoopty, has had quite a few complaints with the DMV. DA: They’re one of the biggest, what they call trespass towing companies. WSHU: Yes, okay. You actually made a FOIA request to get some information from the DMV. Could you tell us a little bit about that? DA: My source told me they had to file these forms. They’re called h-100 forms. You know how the DMV has a million forms under the law to sell a car after 15 days? You have to prove that it’s worth less than $1,500; if it’s worth more than that, then you have to wait 45 days before you can sell the car, and you have to sell it at a public auction. So I was told that they make sure that most of the cars unless it’s an obvious case, are listed as worth $1,500 or less. So we FOI the DMV back in June of 2022 for a couple of years of those records to see how many there were and how often it was happening. And there are literally 1000s of cars a year that they get permission to sell. So it’s not just, you know, a handful here and there. It’s 1000s all over the state. They originally told us it was 11,000 over three years, then they lowered the number. Honestly, I don’t really know what the, but it’s three, three to 4,000 cars a year that they get permission to sell. WSHU: And the DMV was going to charge you $47,000. DA: They told us it would cost us $47,000 to execute the FOI because they had to find the documents and redact them. There are certain things like licenses and VIN numbers that are public, you know, federally protected. So we didn’t have any; we knew there would be stuff redacted, so that was not the problem. But so I asked for an accounting of why it was going to cost $47,000. We had to hire a lawyer, which, you know, delayed the process six or eight months because, you know, we have to have a lawyer get in touch with their lawyer, you know, get an itemized list in the bill of why it was going to cost us $47,000. We thought about writing about it. You do see those stories occasionally to embarrass them, but I’ve never been a big fan of those kinds of stories. And, you know, we needed the documents, so we needed to figure out a way to work with them. So that was June of 2022 when I first put the FOI in. As of today, I think we roughly have about 4,000 documents. So we’re missing, depending on what you believe, from the DMV, anywhere from three to 6000 more documents for the last few years. WSHU: Wow. What are lawmakers doing about this? I understand they’ve tried to tweak the law in the past few years, but it hasn’t gone far. What’s the general representative? Roland Lemar (D-New Haven) is the co-chair of the General Law Committee. He’s a little bit involved in trying to adjust the law. What is he saying? What are they trying to do? DA: So he is going to submit a bill. We expect multiple bills. To be honest with you, I’m waiting for the Speaker of the House to call me right now. The first issue is the 15-day window. It is the third shortest in the entire country. I think they want to look at that. But there’s also, from what Representative Lemar wants to look at, this is also a consumer protection issue. Many of these places will only take cash, right? So if you go, if you don’t have $700 in cash or $600 in cash, they won’t give you your car back. Some of these places aren’t open on weekends, so what they do is they tow your car on Friday afternoon, and then they have it over the weekend. So they’re now charging you three days’ storage instead of one day’s storage. So your bill, instead of being, you know, $180 is now $600 and for some people, that’s a lot of money if you live paycheck to paycheck, that’s a lot of money. So I think that’s part of what he wants to look at some of the consumer protection issues here and our consumers getting taken advantage of, or do they need to look at those laws. But I also think that they’re going to look at how DMV deals with these forms. I think they basically rubber-stamped the forms, though they did write the blue book value of the car on each form, and the blue book value compared to what the towers claim it’s worth is always significantly different. Now, in some of those cases, legitimately, a car may have been in an accident, and it’s not worth what it was, but there’s no way to really know, looking at what we’ve seen so far. So I expect at least two different bills to look at this issue. WSHU: In the meantime, a lot of these people who could least afford to lose their cars no longer have those cars and still owe the tow companies money. DA: Yes, the other part of this that we’re going to do as a follow-up under the law — so if you sell my car, you’re supposed to keep that money in escrow for one year because I have the right legally to request that money since it was my car. No one ever does. No one knows about that. And after a year, if no one makes a claim, the tower is supposed to take their fees, and the rest of the money is supposed to go to the state of Connecticut. WSHU: Does the state have any record of getting that money? DA: None. No, there’s never been a towing company that has given any money to the state after selling someone’s car. And the towers blame it on the DMV. The DMV blames it on the towers and the Treasury office because the treasurer runs the Unclaimed Property fund, but it has never happened. And you know, a lot of these cars don’t sell for a significant amount of money, but some of them are nice cars. It’s hard to quantify what that means to the state, but there’s no doubt the state has. There’s been money that should have gone for the state that has never gone to the state.