SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — San Diego officials say big changes are coming to the city’s vehicle towing policies in the wake of a recent audit showing the policies disproportionately hurt low-income people and other vulnerable groups.
The city is exploring a “text before tow” program, parking “boots,” community service instead of fines, fee forgiveness, income-based payment plans and eliminating tows when the only infraction is failure to pay registration fees.
“Our towing policy worsens inequities and has devastating impacts on people’s lives,” said Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, who is spearheading the changes with help from City Attorney Mara Elliott. “The city should not take people’s cars and sell them to collect small debts or punish people for minor violations.”
The 49-page audit found the top two reasons a vehicle gets towed — registrations expired longer than six months, and violations of the 72-hour parking rule on many city streets — typically affect low-income people more than others.
Council said Monday that a person’s entire life can go off-course if their car gets towed when they can’t afford to pay the fines required to get it back.
They said losing a vehicle can cause someone to miss work, which can cause them to lose their home, which can force them to the growing homeless population the city is spending so much to address.
“We are essentially subsidizing ruining people’s lives, possibly putting them on the street,” Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe said. “It’s a vicious cycle. It’s what poverty does to people in this country.”
Talmadge resident Paul Kreuger said city officials should be careful about the changes.
“There is no district in this city in which people want cars littering their streets,” he said.
Krueger also said complaints filed with the city’s Get It Done! tipster app show that residents want more enforcement and towing, not less.
Montgomery Steppe and her council colleagues stressed that the city won’t stop enforcing abandoned-car laws and other parking violations that diminish quality of life. They will just find a way to avoid disproportionately impacting low-income people.
“If someone has seven cars and one is rusted and it’s been on the street for three years, that’s completely different than a mother living in a car with three children,” she said. “And we should be able, at this point in our society, to differentiate that.”
City officials say another motive for making changes in the city’s towing program, which is led by the Police Department, is that the program is losing roughly $1.5 million a year.
“Why are we doing this to ourselves?” Whitburn asked. “Why are we doing this to our constituents? We are completely upending someone’s life.”
Whitburn said it’s unacceptable that 32,000 cars have been towed and then sold by the city during the past six years, stressing that it most often happens because the owners can’t afford the fines.
“When the city tows your car it goes to an impound lot, and to get the car out of the impound lot, the person who is already struggling to pay the bills has to pay a towing fee, an impound fee and a couple of city fees,” he said.
The audit, released in November, says a vehicle owner typically pays $282 to retrieve their car in San Diego — not including the violation that prompted the tow.
During the five years the audit covers — fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2021 — more than a quarter of all tows resulted in the owner giving the vehicle up instead of paying the fines owed.
The audit says that may be a key reason why the city loses money, explaining that the city rarely recovers its costs in such cases.
Prompted by a recommendation in the audit, police officials agreed to make the program more transparent by completing a statistics-rich comprehensive report by July. It would be the first such report in a decade.
Council said Monday that they expect to embrace Whitburn’s recommendations.
“I welcome any potential changes that would aim to still enforce our policies but also ensure our policies and our fee structures can be more equitable and comionate,” Councilmember Kent Lee said.
