Tow truck drivers in Montgomery County might soon have to wait at least 15 minutes before hooking up illegally parked cars.
The County Council’s Public Safety Committee Monday recommended a new law that provides a 15-minute grace period for illegal parkers, a measure one council member said “puts common decency, not tow companies first.”
The law, according to council members and the county’s Office of Consumer Protection, is meant to curb the type of aggressive or so-called “predatory” towing in which a person’s vehicle is towed minutes after parking.
The Office of Consumer Protection, which helped put together the original bill sponsored by council member Roger Berliner, says it often gets complaints from people who claim they walked off the property where they had parked for a matter of minutes before returning to find their vehicle hooked up to a tow truck.
In January, Office of Consumer Protection Director Eric Friedman appeared on a report for NBC’s Today show that featured one of downtown Bethesda’s most notorious parking lots when it comes to towing.
A producer of the segment left her car in the small parking lot near the Mattress Warehouse at 6930 Wisconsin Ave., walked off the property and about 10 minutes later, a tow truck driver showed up to tow it away.
The average cost to reclaim a towed car from an impound lot is $160, plus the costs associated with getting to the lot.
“That, to me, is not a punishment that fits the crime,” said Berliner, who later tweeted that the latest version of the bill is about “common decency.”
Many aspects of the bill have changed since it was first introduced, but a ban on the practice of “spotting” remains.
While the state outlawed spotting in a law that went into effect in 2012, many say local tow truck companies still use the tactic—in which an employee of a tow truck company will scan parking lots looking for people who walk off, possibly to use an ATM machine or walk into a store on a neighboring property.
The law, if approved by the full council, would adopt the model used in New Jersey, where tow truck companies and property owners are banned from employing people “whose primary task is to report the presence of unauthorized parked vehicles for the purpose of towing or removal.”
The law would effectively leave it up to property owners, or tenants of a property, to notice people walking off and get photographic evidence before calling a towing company and authorizing a tow of the illegally parked vehicle. The law would require photographic evidence of a person walking off of a property—a provision that’s also part of the 2012 state law.
Tow truck companies would be allowed to monitor and patrol parking lots between 2 and 9 a.m., when most property owners and their tenants aren’t expected to be on-site.
Rockville-based G & G towing, which also goes by the name G & C Gulf Inc., claimed that the state law was unreasonable and unconstitutional to require tow truck drivers to both take photos of walk-off parkers for evidence while also banning spotters.
An Anne Arundel Circuit Court ruled in favor of the tow truck company, but the case was dismissed on appeal earlier this year by the Court of Appeals of Maryland because the company had yet to actually be prosecuted based on the law.
Unlike the state law, the county law would require the photo of the person walking off be included in the receipt when a driver picks up a vehicle at the impound lot.
It would also require written authorization of a tow from a property owner or designated tenant that would be provided to the Office of Consumer Protection.
Among other measures, the bill would change the rules for “drop fees,” which drivers can pay to have their cars released when they return to a parking lot to find their vehicles in the process of being hooked up to a tow truck.
The drop fee would be reduced from $50 to $25 and tow truck operators would be required to provide credit card payment options on the spot, as opposed to just cash payment.
