If your car is towed in Vermont, you’re on your own.

By Aubrey Weaver

Towing companies don’t have to let you retrieve phones, prescriptions or anything else from your vehicle. They can charge any rate to hold it, aren’t required to accept credit cards and don’t have to take a picture before towing. If your vehicle gets damaged in storage, companies don’t have to reimburse you. You are entitled to no compensation if the tow was illegal.

Vermont is among the five states with the fewest protections for owners of towed vehicles, according to the Public Interest Research Group, the federation of consumer advocacy nonprofits whose Vermont chapter wields considerable state influence.

“There are almost no protections in place in Vermont,” said Vermont Public Interest Research Group communications director Zach Tomanelli. 

And Vermonters are feeling it. Since 2017, people have filed 35 towing-related complaints to the Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program, many involving situations that aren’t illegal in Vermont but are sanctioned in many other states. 

In 2023 already, more complaints have been filed than any of the last six years. 

One consumer in 2021 reported being charged $700 for 47 minutes of work by a company that charges $350 per hour for a minimum of two hours. The company never mentioned its rates online, and the consumer said they got quotes from other businesses at a third of what she was charged. 

In another complaint, from 2018, a man reported his credit card was charged $300 for towing services in the morning, but then the charge was refunded and he was told he could not pay with credit. Even though his card had just been charged, he was told to pay in certified funds — and the bill had gone up to $460.

Both instances depict a complaint that addresses something Vermont doesn’t protect. There is no law forcing towing companies to publicly post their rates, and towing companies aren’t required to accept credit as a form of payment.

Legislative efforts in the past decade to regulate towing have been fruitless. Rep. Barbara Rachelson, D-Chittenden, has been trying and failing to pass a towing regulation package in the Legislature for seven years. When asked about the holdup, Rachelson said, “The barriers are always the towing lobby.”

The Vermont Towing Association, a collective representing 45 towing companies, employs Vincent Illuzzi, Essex County state’s attorney and a former state lawmaker of more than 30 years, as their lobbyist. Illuzzi directed requests for comments to the association’s president, Bob Montminy of Northeast Kingdom–based B&B Towing, who did not respond to multiple calls and voicemails.

“A lot of states have done a ‘Towing Bill of Rights,’ where they say you have to take photos of the situation before towing, it can’t be more than a certain rate and then there’s somebody that’s regulating it so that it can keep current with inflation,” said Rachelson. 

The last time one of her towing bills was granted a hearing in the House Transportation Committee was in March 2019. 

The hearing on March 28, 2019, on towing included a plurality of perspectives both for and against the bill. 

Jack McCullough, the mayor of Montpelier and then-director of Vermont Legal Aid’s Mental Health Law Project, said in his testimony that he had seen towing issues with “some frequency” in his work. 

McCullough described how he had seen cases where Legal Aid clients have their cars towed when they are picked up by the police to be brought to a psychiatric hospital. “The car could be towed many miles away from where the person winds up, and the person could be in the hospital for days, weeks or sometimes months with no real ability to get the car back,” McCullough said. 

He added, “It doesn’t take long for the towing charges to exceed the value of the car for an impoverished person,” before urging for greater regulations. 

Critics of that 2019 towing bill highlighted the anticipated material losses of implementing a $40 towing fee cap like the bill, H.201, proposed. 

Michael Kollman, then-president of the Vermont Tower’s Association, testified against the bill, citing expenses towing companies would incur. “You’re asking a tow truck company to send $200,000 to $300,000 worth of equipment and three to five men to do a call for $40. None of that adds up,” he said. 

Kollman, the owner of Hillside Auto in Springfield, said that his personal cost per call in Springfield is over $80 per call. “That’s what it costs me to run a regular call,” he said. 

To Kollman, $40 just doesn’t cut it. “We have trained men. We have huge expenses and insurance costs.”

Vermont State Police Lt. Tom Mozzer also testified against the bill, advocating for a law enforcement exemption for the proposed $40 towing fee cap. “Ninety percent of law enforcement tows are without the consent of the owner,” Mozzer said, adding that “a $40 towing fee falls short of compensation in almost every case.”  

Asked recently about compensation concerns, Rachelson clarified: “I get they should be paid, but they should not get to set whatever rates, and they need to be open more hours and not charge for storage.” 

“We all need towing on occasion, right? It’s not that towing itself is bad,” she said. “It’s just a field that’s not very well regulated … Some states have done better jobs than Vermont has done.”

A transportation omnibus bill passed last session and signed into law reformed one aspect of towing in the state by placing a $125 fee cap on involuntary towing of abandoned vehicles. 

The bill was originally written with a proposed $40 cap but was revised before passage on the recommendation of towing operators like Montminy, who submitted notes requesting higher caps to the committee. 

As part of that act, the attorney general’s office was directed to put together a report on towing practices in Vermont to present to the legislature by the start of the upcoming legislative session.

Tomanelli, from Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said the organization had submitted suggestions to the attorney general’s office this fall.

Rachelson plans to continue her fight to pass regulations on towing and remains hopeful things will be different next session.

“I’ve gotten incredible survey data on people who, like, you can’t believe the stories — they’re pretty awful, and they’re pretty regular,” the representative said.

The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.