With a Georgia company leaving town, local towing companies are waiting to find out who gets to immobilize scofflaws’ cars — and haul them away.
Some are as mad about the pending deal as, well … people who get their cars booted and towed.
The city’s in the final stages of negotiating a contract with Crown Auto company to start putting the mechanical “boot” — or wheel immobilizer—on parked cars whose owners owe the city more than $200 in parking tickets.
Right now that job is done by a Georgia company called VioAlert. The city hired VioAlert in May of 2008 to start placing an immobilizing mechanical “boot” on cars. That gave scofflaws at least 12 hours to pay their bills before a separate local company towed away their vehicles.
VioAlert has decided to pull up chains and leave town. It couldn’t make any money here, according to CEO Karl Faerber. City law limits booters to $55 fees. VioAlert discovered that was too little.
“Boot fees around the country are three times that,” Faerber said Thursday. He said he’s leaving New Haven on good terms. Trying out the boot program here helped him develop his “business model” and take it to other cities, including Bridgeport, which he said is paying him an undisclosed higher fee.
Meanwhile, the city is in the final stages of negotiating a contract with Crown Auto to take over the booting, and then get the lucrative work of towing all booted cars. The contract would also allow the company to tow all cars identified by the city as belonging to owners who owe back property taxes.
That’s a big change. Right now all that towing — for ticket scofflaws and tax debtors alike — goes to towing companies throughout town on a rotating basis. Not to just one company.
City Controller Mark Pietrosimone, who’s overseeing the new contract, said he has indeed been negotiating with one company for the whole contract. He said he hopes to have the contract completed next week.
Jeff Hansen, the business’ owner, declined to comment on the details. “Until I finish [negotiating] with the city I won’t be able to answer intelligently,” he said.
Pietrosimone said that only three competitors bid for the contract — two local companies and one out-of-state company. Pietrosimone said the chosen finalist would handle all the towing itself, not use a rotation system.
Vincent J. DeLauro (shown in this file video accompanying this story), owner of Columbus Towing in the Hill, said he put in a bid. He said his bid would have Columbus do the booting but would preserve the rotating list of towers.
The pending new arrangement has some towing companies in town grumbling on and off the record about losing business. They call it unfair — and point to the city charter to argue that it’s illegal. Subsection d of Section 29 – 118 of the charter states: “The police chief or his designee shall rotate or assign municipal towing services among the towers of the municipal towing list on a reasonably fair, equitable and nondiscriminatory basis consistent with the capacity and location of each tower, the needs of the city, and the protection of the public.”
Pietrosimone responded that the city is continuing to use a rotating list for most tows. That includes cars towed for parking illegally on public streets at rush hour or during street sweeping, or blocking private driveways.
He also said the towers have no basis to complain — because most of them never bid. The city issued a public request for proposals, inviting bids. Everyone in the field knew about it.
“I’m sure they all took the easy way out and relied on someone else to do all the work for them,” Pietrosimone said. “All the other towers were notified.”
Fountain’s Garage owner George Fellows said no one from the city ever notified him. He said he found out about the bid after it was too late to apply. He said he was hoping the city would choose Columbus for the booting so a rotation towing system would remain in place.
“Shame on me if I didn’t see [the notice about bids] in the newspaper,” Fellows said Friday. But “the city should have gone to the towers who have been faithful to them all this time.”
“I think it should be distributed equally among the towers,” Fellows said about the towing system. “That’s the way it’s been before.”
Reasons For Change
The city decided to change the system to address two problems, according to Pietrosimone (pictured).
One: The need to streamline the city to free up cops and address public complaints. The police department was getting jammed up with calls from people whose cars were towed after hours. Then cops had to track down which lots cars went to. And people had trouble getting their cars at night and finding out where to pay their bills. Now if cars are towed, everyone will know to go straight to one lot, and can pay their bills there.
Two: Having one company boot cars, and another tow them, led to confusion among the two operators. They “pointed fingers” at each other when billing or towing got messed up, or people didn’t know where their cars went. This would eliminate that confusion.
Under the new contract, the city will continue immediately towing cars for unpaid taxes — at first. But after six or seven weeks the city will reconsider the question and perhaps start placing boots on those cars, too, as it does with ticket scofflaws’ cars, in order to give owners that 12 hour minimum window of opportunity to avoid a tow.
Asked about the upcoming changes, Hill Alderman Jorge Perez, who has taken a leading role in reforming towing practices in the city, responded, “This is news to me. It would have been nice if they [at City Hall] would have given us [aldermen] a heads up.”
Perez said that in general he believes “it’s much better and more transparent if you have a rotating system” for towing. But he said he’s reserving judgment on the new contract until he can discuss it with city officials.
One towing dispatcher Louis Consiglio of Tony’s Long Wharf, shrugged off the pending change.
“Good luck to them. It was a headache,” Consiglio said of towing booted cars. “These guys boot cars, and you’ve got to go out and tow them. It was a pain in the neck. You had to get the chains off … You could get killed.”