This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
A Hartford woman never saw her car again after it was towed while she sat in housing court fighting an eviction.
A home care worker had her car towed while she hurried to assist a patient down the stairs.
A young man lost his car and slipped into financial instability after he mistakenly put his apartment’s parking sticker in the wrong spot.
Late last month, Connecticut lawmakers, following a series of stories by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica, passed sweeping reforms to the state’s towing laws that will address many of the issues drivers have complained about. The stories highlighted how towing companies can begin the process to sell people’s cars after 15 days, one of the shortest windows in the country.
Reporters heard from dozens of drivers across Connecticut who had to pay exorbitant fees or had their vehicles sold when they couldn’t afford the charges. Many told reporters about the severe consequences they experienced after their cars were towed or sold, including the loss of jobs, personal mementos and housing.
While some people’s cars might not have been towed under the new law, which takes effect Oct. 1, it doesn’t solve all the problems that vehicle owners raised.
Here are some of their stories, as well as whether the changes in the new law would have helped them.
Towing Home Health Aides
Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.
Home care worker Maria Jiménez circled the Hartford apartment complex for low-income seniors, looking for a place to park. Jiménez drives patients to and from errands like doctor’s appointments and grocery shopping. Her patient that day last November used a cane, and Jiménez planned to park close so that her patient wouldn’t have to walk too far.
Unsuccessful, Jiménez stopped in front of the building’s entrance.
“I turned on the hazard lights and left the car on, just long enough to let her know I had arrived, since I didn’t have her phone number,” she said. Jiménez said she told a few bystanders she would be right back and asked them to keep an eye on her car.
She said she went inside only briefly, and when she returned, the car was gone. Bystanders told Jiménez the car had been towed and that they’d pleaded with the truck’s driver, to no avail.
Tracy Wodatch, president and CEO at Connecticut Association for Healthcare at Home, said many of her members complain about getting ticketed or towed when they’re doing their jobs helping people.
When it happens frequently enough at a particular complex, she said, an agency might speak with the landlord to ask for a designated spot. But there isn’t a statewide mandate.
New Jersey passed a law in 2018 allowing home health care workers, visiting nurses and others to apply for a placard similar to an accessible parking tag to place in their cars.
“Maybe we can talk to the legislators off session to see if there’s anything we can do,” Wodatch said.
The company that towed Jiménez, MyHoopty.com, was in Watertown, and Jiménez was stranded over 30 miles away in Hartford. “How will I get there if I don’t have a car?” she recalled thinking.
MyHoopty owner Michael Festa said the vehicle was parked in the fire lane without its hazard lights on for 17 minutes before it was towed and that the apartment complex had hired MyHoopty to prevent such parking violations.
“This is a critical safety issue, particularly at an elderly housing complex where the emergency access can be a matter of life and death,” Festa said. (MyHoopty has appeared in other stories in our series.)
The apartment complex owners didn’t respond to calls and emails for comment.
Jiménez said she makes about $290 a week. By the time she got to MyHoopty, the company told her the bill was more than $400.
Her husband footed the bill. But it wasn’t easy: “The only reason I could afford it is because I work mornings, I work nights,” he said.
Short Meters and Unpaid Tickets
Not fixed: The bill does not address this issue.
Marie Franklin paid the parking meter and dashed into Hartford housing court for a December 2023 hearing that would determine if she would get evicted from her apartment. She worried about the parking. People can wait for hours for the judge to call their cases, but the Hartford Parking Authority limits nearby meters to two hours.
So people facing eviction sometimes run the risk of getting a parking violation, getting their cars towed or missing their names being called for hearings, which can cause them to lose their housing in a default judgement for not showing up to court.
Joshua Michtom, a Hartford City Council member and an attorney who has represented children and parents in juvenile court, said although there’s a nearby parking garage, it’s more expensive and it fills up.
“You have to be there, but then you don’t know how long you’re going to have to wait,” Michtom said. “And the courts are not particularly forgiving if you’re not there the moment your case gets called.”
When Franklin’s name was finally called, a judge rejected her plea to stave off eviction. Dejected and stressed about losing her home, she walked out of court only to discover her 2015 Volvo was gone. Franklin had more than a dozen unpaid parking tickets, some of which were nearly 20 years old. She’d forgotten about some, and others were for vehicles she no longer owned. About half of the tickets were for exceeding the meter limit or parking over the line near the courthouse.
“I had paid for the parking meter and everything,” Franklin said. “They drive around, and they look for people’s cars.”
Credit:
Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror
Jill Turlo, CEO of the Hartford Parking Authority, said the agency’s officers use license plate scanners to find people with outstanding tickets. Turlo said “high-traffic metered areas,” like the street the courthouse is on, are “regularly patrolled by parking enforcement.” Turlo said that the parking authority has not received any requests to extend the time for metered parking near the courthouses.
While towing cars for unpaid parking tickets is a common practice for cities, Minnesota passed a law last year barring such tows, seeing them as an unfair burden on low-income families. Several cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, have also stopped such tows after a California appeals court ruled that towing cars for unpaid parking tickets violated people’s rights against warrantless seizures, said Rebecca Miller, an attorney with the Western Center on Law & Poverty.
Hartford has one of the strictest policies in Connecticut. A city ordinance allows tows after two or more unpaid tickets that date back to September 2012. Other cities including Danbury and New Britain don’t tow for unpaid tickets. Norwalk and Waterbury will tow if there are four unpaid tickets; Stamford tows for three unpaid tickets or more than $250 owed, officials in those cities said. The limit in Bridgeport is $100, and New Haven’s is $200.
“We do have an ordinance where we can boot a car for unpaid tickets, but we haven’t used it in years,” said Deborah Pacific, director of the Danbury Parking Authority.
When Franklin went to eviction court, she had been trying to hold onto the place she and her daughter lived while she looked for a new job. Between unpaid fines, late fees, and towing and storage charges, it would have cost almost $3,000 to get her car back, she said.
“I would have chose to pay whatever I owed to my housing. So my car, there was nothing I could do,” Franklin said.
The vehicle was towed by Metro Auto Body & Towing, which did not return calls and emails for comment. It was later sold by the lender.
After losing her car and housing, Franklin moved to Florida to stay with her son.
Parking Sticker in the Wrong Place
Fixed: Apartment residents now have 72 hours if caught without a parking permit or with an expired one.
It’s often little discrepancies that lead to big consequences. When Tishawn Tillman moved into his Hartford apartment in September, he got a parking sticker that allowed him to park in the building’s private lot. He said he wasn’t sure where to put it, so he stuck it on the driver’s side window.
But less than a month later, his car was towed by Cross Country Automotive in Hartford.
“There is absolutely no legal documentation in my lease that says that this has to be strictly on the windshield,” Tillman said.
Minor rule violations such as parking crooked or not backing into a space have caused people’s cars to be towed and then sold when they couldn’t afford the fees. Stories like Tillman’s drove legislators to act. Under the new law, the towing company would have had to warn Tillman, giving him 72 hours to get a new sticker and place it in the right spot. The law also says towers have to get permission from the apartment complex to tow a vehicle unless it’s blocking traffic or parked in a fire lane.
Tillman said he assumed his car had been stolen. But the police told him it had been towed.
Tillman contacted Cross Country: “I asked them, ‘Did you see my sticker?’ And they said, ‘We didn’t see the sticker.’” He said he called the apartment manager, but he wouldn’t help.
“When I realized that neither of the parties were going to budge on the matter, I told them that I wasn’t going to pay the fine, even if I had the money, which I didn’t at the time,” Tillman said.
Tillman said his bill was “$200 but growing every day.”
He filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office, which said it unsuccessfully tried to resolve the issue through its voluntary mediation program and recommended he complain to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Sal Sena, Cross Country’s owner, submitted a letter to the attorney general saying there are signs all over the parking lot explaining the rules. The apartment manager, Jack Matos, wrote to the attorney general that he talked with Sena about giving TIllman a discount on the towing fees.
“I reiterated Tishawn needs to make sure that it’s placed on the windshield,” Matos wrote.
Frustrated, Tillman eventually gave up trying to get his car back.
“I went from being a self-made young man with his own apartment and car to having to burn a hole in my pocket just to get to and from work on ride-share services like Uber and Lyft,” he said.
Unable to Reclaim Car Despite Having the Title
Fixed: The law allows vehicle owners to reclaim their cars with other documents besides DMV registration.
Shaleah Carr needed two more weeks until her DMV appointment in April to register the Chevrolet Malibu she had just bought from her mom. It was the earliest appointment she could get.
Her boyfriend had taken the car to his brother’s house to work on it when they decided to take it for a test drive. But the car broke down on U.S. Route 5 in South Windsor, and police called for a tow.
Her boyfriend told the tow truck driver that the car was registered to Carr’s mother and that Carr had the title and proof of insurance. But the towing company, Tolland Automotive, wouldn’t release the vehicle to Carr because she wasn’t the registered owner, said the company’s owner, George Fellows. The vehicle was towed on a Friday afternoon, and by the time Carr was able to get to the lot on Monday morning, she owed more than $300.
“I told them I’m on one income and I can’t afford it,” Carr said. “I just paid my rent for that month, and I even asked, ‘Do you guys do payments?’”
Since then, her Malibu has been sitting in the company’s lot.
Credit:
Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror
Carr’s dilemma has happened to people whose cars have been towed across Connecticut — they’ve been unable to quickly register their cars and then blocked from reclaiming them because they’re not registered in their names yet. By the time they can register their cars, so much time has passed that the tow bill is too expensive or the company has sold their car.
The new law gives consumers time to register their car before it can be towed and requires towers to release vehicles if presented with the title or a bill of sale as proof of ownership. The law also requires towers to accept other forms of payment besides cash and demands towers have business hours on weekends so fees don’t accrue while they’re closed.
Fellows said police called them to the scene. “Then we found out that this guy didn’t own the car at all,” Fellows said. Without the owner there, “it had to come back to our shop.”
Carr called her mother. “I was like, ‘You’re going to have to come up here,’ but even if she does, she can’t really do much,” Carr said. “She didn’t have the money to get it back either.”
Carr said the last time she called Tolland Automotive, the bill was $800. Given that she paid her mother only $500 for the car, she said, it almost wasn’t worth trying to get it back anymore.
Fellows said Carr’s mother did come into the office earlier this month with proof of registration, and he is willing to release the vehicle if she pays what is owed.
“It’s all on them,” he said. “I mean they knew what the issue was back then. Why haven’t they come back?”
Asia Fields contributed reporting.