Predatory pricing: What you don’t know about police towing could wreck your wallet | Opinion

A year ago, a cartel of wrecking companies came to Wichita City Hall with demands to increase the fees for towing away cars that broke down on city streets, were in accidents, or just parked in the same place for too may days in a row.

And the city promised to do something to try to protect people from losing their cars, jobs and apartments because they can’t pay towing and storage charges that can only be described as predatory and outrageous.

On Tuesday, the council will consider raising towing rates again, to the detriment of the community and the benefit of a few favored businesses.

How do people get caught up in this mess?

Ask Vernette Chance.

Chance, 76, was in an accident on Nov. 11 of last year. Police had her drive her damaged car into a private parking lot at a vacant building near 13th and Hillside. Within minutes, a tow company called by police arrived and took her car away.

Here are the charges she was hit with:

Tow fee, $125; storage fee (four days at $40), $160; rollback fee, $55; verification and certified check fee, $50; towing mileage, (eight miles at $5 a mile), $40; city administrative fee, $30; accident site cleanup fee, $25; towing lot fee, $20; fuel surcharge fee, $10.

Totaled up, that’s $515 for a tow and four days of it sitting in a parking space at a South Broadway impound lot.

If Chance had known what was to come, she could have called AAA — she’s a member — and had it towed to her home for free. That’s what she did four days later, where the car now sits because she can’t afford to replace the air bag.

She’s hoping to sell the car to someone who parts them out to get enough money to get another one. But she’s already $515 in the hole.

It’s predatory pricing and it’s kicking people when they’re down. And the city government is complicit in it.

Over a third of people whose cars are impounded are forced to let the tow company keep the car and sell it for salvage, because they can’t afford the ridiculous towing fees — and the city gets a piece of the action. The city also gets the $30 per tow “administrative fee” about 1,700 times a year.

A little background: Greg Ferris, former City Council member and now City Hall lobbyist, has assembled towing company owners into a cartel that fixes the prices.

After some initial reluctance to pass higher rates in a public meeting last year, the city quietly renegotiated and ultimately gave tow companies more than they’d asked for in the first place.

A year ago, the tow businesses pleaded poverty and some council members, including Becky Tuttle, bought into it.

“Somebody doesn’t get their car impounded by the police on a frequent basis,” she said. “So the fact of jeopardizing our community members’ jobs or homes is probably limited . . . I think this is an example of a cohort of small businesses that are feeling the strain of the current inflation rates and are asking now to have some recovery from that.”

It’s pretty hard to feel sorry for “small businesses” when they have the gall to charge a senior citizen $305 to tow her car eight miles, plus $160 to let it sit in their yard for four days. They could have parked it at Eisenhower Airport for a fifth of the price.

I’m hoping that Tuttle just didn’t understand the circumstances facing resident like Vernette Chance, and hundreds of others, when she said what she said.

Chance is actually one of the lucky ones, because she’s retired. If she had to get to a job every day, she’d have almost certainly lost it months ago.

Until and unless the city fixes this scam, I can only offer this advice: If you’re in an accident, arrange for the towing yourself or have a family member do it. If the car’s upright on four wheels, it will cost $75 to $90 for towing anywhere in the city, not $515.

Don’t let the police tow truck touch your car. You may never get it back.