Bill Aims to Curb Predatory Towing in Montgomery County

Predatory towing faces severe limitations in Montgomery County after the County Council unanimously approved a bill to limit some of the practices, such as using spotters to seek out vehicles and only accepting cash to get vehicles out of impound.

According to Montgomery Community Media, the bill will:

• Authorize the County Executive to set flat rates for certain towing services.
• Require towing companies to have personnel available 24 hours a day at impound lots so vehicle owners can retrieve cars at any time.
• Require one notice sign per 25 spaces in parking lots with 100 or more parking spaces, in addition to requiring signs at entrances.
• Require photographic evidence of violations or of events precipitating the towing of a vehicle.
• Prohibit the use of “spotters” to identify vehicles for towing.
• Require towing companies to accept credit cards as well as cash for the redemption of vehicles.

The Council made several amendments to the original bill, including a prohibition of “patrol towing” of commercial lots by providing that a towing company “must not monitor, patrol or otherwise surveil commercial property for the purposes of identifying unauthorized parked vehicles for towing and removal.”

Other features in the bill will: strengthen the Office of Consumer Protection’s ability to enforce the law; require written authorization for each tow in the form of an authorization form provided in person, or via fax, email, or other electronic means; make contracts between property owners and towing companies more informative as to respective parties’ obligations and liability under the law; and make several changes to more closely aligning the County law with State law.

“Every year there are 30,000 tows from private property in our county. Too many residents have been victims of the unscrupulous business practices of predatory towing,” said the lead sponsor of Bill 17-15 Council member RogerBerliner. “Towing is an extraordinary act, and it should only be done for legitimate reasons. The bill we passed today will better protect consumers. Notably, it will ban the use of spotters, who are used to identify and tow away vehicles as quickly as possible and it will give the Office of Consumer Protection the powers it needs to enforce the law and protect consumers. And at the same time, the bill was amended to ensure that our HOAs and condo associations, which have worked very hard to set the right balance in their parking policies, are treated differently from the commercial lots where we see the most worrisome predatory practices. This bill will not only help our residents but our businesses as well, who lose customers as a result of predatory towing.”

The bill also will allow vehicle owners to retrieve personal property from a vehicle that has been towed, but has not yet been released. It sets a maximum $25 fee for “incomplete tows” in situations where a vehicle has been hooked up to a tow truck, but the owner then approaches the truck operator and asks for their vehicle to not be towed.

Another provision in the bill requires property owners who wish to engage in non-consensual towing of vehicles for violating their parking policies to first electronically register their commercial lots and provide annual reports on towing activity, unless the director of the Office of Consumer Protection waives the requirement after a finding that Police Department records meet the OCP’s needs for enforcement of the law.