Take my personal liberty, and perhaps I will spend a night in jail with interesting companions. But take my vehicle for several days, and you might be taking my means of income, my relationship with my family, friends, and romantic partners, indeed, you might be taking my life and future itself. It is totally unacceptable that American vehicles should be seized on such flimsy grounds, made so difficult to locate, and be ransomed at such high cost in time and money. Enough!
Some months back, I blogged about the situation in San Marcos, Texas, where predatory towing was giving the town a "black mark" in the public eye... I recently tried to follow up and see what San Marcos had done about its predatory towing. The answer: probably made it worse while supposedly making it better.
First of all, on September 5...after sitting on this issue through most of the summer, it appears...San Marcos "revised" the towing fees. Yeah, they "revised" the fees all right: UPWARD.
Current word, according to this article, is San Marcos will address the abusive towing practices at a "future meeting." Reform--such as NOT TOWING PEOPLE'S CARS ALL THE WAY TO AUSTIN, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD--seems pretty doubtful.
For now, it is probably advisable to avoid this city, which has such tourist destinations as the popular San Marcos Outlet Mall, pictured above.
I only recently found out about Sean Cruz and all his work in Oregon, which I blogged about in this post. Well, it turns out a predatory towing issue Sean was banging the drum about recently made some media march to battle to expose a shocking abuse of handicapped citizens happening in Portland. Here is the article.. ...which shows every sign of being a result of Sean's handiwork from his original blog post about the outrageous scam, click here.
The long and the short of the scam went like this: There was a restaurant named McCall's, and it was no longer in business. But the restaurant's parking lot had some handicapped spaces, and a guy named Mike Meier, a paraplegic, parked there with his handicapped permit properly displayed. And he got towed...for not having a "special McCall's permit," or so he was told.
It turns out the towing company, Sergeants Towing, had been hauling vehicles away from that spot for half a year without any legal authority to do so.
Yes, Sergeants Towing once had a contract to patrol that particular parking lot...Oregon being the only one of the three West Coast states which even ALLOWS "patrol towing"...but the contract was no longer valid. The business which had contracted with the towing company wasn't even in that building anymore.
Think Of It As "Mineral Rights" To The Steel In Your Car
Tim Barrett, who focuses on predatory towing in the State of Oregon and has worked closely with Sean Cruz, says unscrupulous towing companies who are engaged in "patrol towing" look upon these contracts as "mineral rights." Even if the business which granted the "right" to patrol the lot ceases to exist, predatory towing companies see the lots as their "turf" and continue to tow cars...even when the lot is virtually empty! And, as it turns out, even towing from the handicapped spots.
Well, now Sergeants will have to pay back all that money. And it all happened because a paraplegic man STOOD UP FOR HIS RIGHTS and wouldn't let go of the issue for FIVE MONTHS. His hunch said something was wrong, and he wouldn't let go of that hunch.
Montreal does something incredibly unique when it comes to towing cars in the winter: they tow the car to get it out of the way, then they BRING IT BACK!
There are still many flaws in their system, for example... ...the YouTube member who submitted this video was complaining about how vehicles were towed without first being given "advisories," then were dumped in spots quite different from where they were originally parked. Furthermore, the vehicles were then given tickets for being parked in those spots.
But if you live in a city like St. Paul, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, you'd have to be thinking WHAT ARE THOSE CANADIANS COMPLAINING ABOUT? Their municipal governments move the cars so they can, in effect, sweep under them? Then they give the cars BACK? The fines and inconvenience are relatively MINOR compared to a trip to the impound lot?
The Montreal model shows how many of our assumptions about how things "have to be" are inaccurate. Canada is incredibly concerned about human rights, and that concern even shows up in how they tow vehicles. Or how they DON'T tow vehicles; at least not all the way to the impound lot.
Wouldn't electronic notification work a world of good, here? The people sleeping in those nearby buildings would receive an email (it might come to their Blackberry device) as well as a call on their cell phone, or a text message. The message would tell them to MOVE THEIR CAR or it will get moved for them.
Even in Canada--which has quite an interesting model--there is room for improvement, and for more innovative use of technology to make towing less predatory, less abusive, less random and inconvenient and bureaucratic. Oh, need I mention: less of a violation of human rights.
And Speaking Of Better Technology
Oh, yeah, this is indeed my first video embed on this blog. I picked up a few tricks on my other blog, while covering the RNC 2008 protests, and I'm applying that knowledge here. I'd really like to shoot some video of the "tricked and trapped on Washington Ave. SE" phenomenon, and present it here at some point down the road.
I hear stories all the time about the outrageous and predatory towing. Citizens, reach for your cell phone and put it on the internet. Dump it on YouTube. Send out links.
If it's caught on video, they can't say it didn't happen.
Sophie's (layperson) attempt at legal research produced a classic bureaucratic runaround, and a discovery that a supposed "federal law" to protect citizens from predatory towing doesn't do much of anything...except allegedly empower states to do something. If they want. When they get around to it. Yawn. Nappy time.
On the one hand, the digging which went into my last handful of posts tell me Oregon is a predatory towing theme park. But on the other hand, I've discovered there are activists and journalists vigorously exposing these issues in Oregon...is it possible Oregon is no better and no worse than a lot of other places, but some folks in Oregon are awake and aware? I hope that's actually the case.
Just when I thought I'd heard every low-down, dodgy artifice (some) (unsavory) towing companies use, something surprising comes out of Portland. There, a towing company was playing "musical piece of (expletive) cars" on the public streets... It can all be found in this article from The Mercury--a wonderful publication, though eerily similar to Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. (I suspect there are some strong ties between these publications, old faves from my Seattle days in the 1990s)
But back to Portland: there, a towing company slash salvage-yard-starter-kit basically turned public streets into its own private storage area for junkers. Nice. Portland, Oregon is beginning to sounds like a theme park of predatory and abusive towing issues.
As for the picture...it's a car my brother was hauling off for scrap. My son and his little cousins thought it would be fun to set off smoke bombs on the vehicle and make it look like it was burning up just as my brother walked out of the house.
I learned of Sean Cruz from an article in the Portland Mercury, which discussed how a towing company mistakenly and REPEATEDLY towed his legally parked vehicle. Most people would be forced to passively endure, or perhaps complain to a public official, but Sean Cruz... ...was the Chief of Staff for State Senator Avel Gordly, Democrat, Northeast Portland. So LEGISLATION came out of what might otherwise be nothing but a private and infuriating burden to bear.
As I try to stitch together a blog to cover predatory towing issues on a NATIONAL scale, it is amazing to discover these highly developed pockets of resistance in places like Carrboro, North Carolina or a longtime crusader like Sean Cruz. Predatory towing is real, but so is spirited resistance to predatory towing practices.
Flickr.com photo
