This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror and originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.
In the summer of 2022, a source called me with a tip about towing. “The details of how this works,” he said, “your head’s gonna spin.”
It turns out Connecticut has a more than 100-year-old law that allows tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they can convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that the vehicle is worth $1,500 or less.
The time frame, we learned by calling every state, is one of the shortest in the country.
So I set out to answer what I thought was a simple question: How many cars have towing companies sold?
I submitted a request to the DMV under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.
Two-and-a-half years later, it seems the DMV doesn’t even know the answer — and we’re still waiting for thousands of records.
In the fall of 2022, the DMV told me it would cost us $47,000 to get the documents. Not only did it sound like the sticker price for a new car, but I realized we were in for a long fight. (The DMV now says the estimate was an error.)
The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles’ initial estimate for the cost of obtaining documents
(Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)
We had sought one-page forms called H-100s that tow truck companies must submit to the DMV to get permission to sell someone’s car. Those forms could help us find out a lot of information — which companies are trying to sell cars quickly and what the DMV does with those requests.
Getting the documents was key to learning about towing practices in Connecticut and the real impact they have on people’s lives.
After asking the DMV to produce an itemized accounting of the $47,000 bill, we asked our attorney to appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission. Our attorney negotiated a compromise in April 2023. We agreed to pay $1,900 to cover the agency’s costs of redacting thousands of documents our request entailed.
The next month, we got our first group of forms, and it finally felt like we were on our way, until I opened the first batch and saw this:
(Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)
In addition to being heavily redacted, many forms were handwritten, and the DMV didn’t seem to have a database or a system for keeping track of them. Agency officials initially told us there were 11,700 documents. Then they told us there were more than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they say there are about 4,100 for that year. The DMV hasn’t been able to explain the discrepancies. Officials also said the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.
The DMV’s slow drip of providing the forms made us have to look for other ways to find people whose cars were towed and then sold without their consent.
My colleague Ginny Monk, who covers housing, had heard complaints from renters about tow truck companies that had contracts with their apartment complexes. People were getting towed for not backing into their parking spaces or failing to properly display their parking stickers. Many people couldn’t get to the tow lot, which was at least a half-hour away, and others just didn’t have the money to pay the fees.
Under the law, towing companies must notify the local police within two hours of removing a car. So we submitted public records requests to several police departments for their call logs.
We also requested incident reports from the police department where one tow lot was located and found dozens of complaints, most from people who said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged.
The police records also referenced DMV investigations into some of the same incidents. So we submitted a FOIA request to the DMV in February for investigations into several towing companies. That took four months but gave us more insight into the problem.
“It may be just a car to some,” Melissa Anderson of Hamden, Connecticut, wrote in her complaint, “but for my family it was sanity, peace of mind stolen from us.”
As we got closer to publishing our story last fall, the DMV began to send us more forms. We now have roughly 4,200. But the agency’s lawyer has told us there are still thousands more it has yet to turn over.
Just days after our story was published, at least two bills were introduced in the state legislature to address some of the issues raised in our reporting. The DMV said it would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices, and the speaker of the House promised that fixing the towing laws will be a “priority” this legislative session.
We hope the interest generated by our story will induce the DMV to release the remaining records soon. Meanwhile, if you’ve had your car towed in Connecticut, we hope you’ll take some time to fill out this questionnaire.
Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.
Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, contributed reporting.
