bilateral
TopicsAbout← Feed
BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
LOCALApril 27, 2026

Some Connecticut Towing Companies Are Ignoring New Law Aimed at Helping Low-Income Residents

Connecticut passed sweeping towing law reforms in May 2025, overhauling a more than 100-year-old statute, with the new rules taking effect October 1, 2025. The law was prompted by a yearlong investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that found state laws systematically favored towing companies at the expense of low-income residents. Despite the reforms, state officials and consumer advocates report that a subset of towing companies are not complying with the new requirements, and the DMV commissioner has proposed additional legislative fixes.

XLinkedInFacebookThreadsWhatsAppReddit

Connecticut passed a law to protect low-income people from ruinous towing fees. Now some companies are simply ignoring it. Who's supposed to enforce it—and what happens when they don't?

Not familiar with this story? Get context →
Price controls causing service shortages
Conservative
The state set the price, refused to set it high enough to cover costs, and is now calling businesses criminals for not complying. When you mandate weekend availability and credit card infrastructure without compensating operators for those costs — and towing companies have said publicly that the rate increases fall short — you aren't protecting low-income residents. You're making it economically irrational to serve them at all.
Liberal
You're treating the rate dispute and the non-compliance as the same thing, but they aren't. A company that thinks rates are too low has a legitimate grievance to bring to the DMV — a company that therefore stops accepting credit cards and tows cars without warning is imposing the cost of that dispute on the person least able to bear it. Those are not equivalent acts, and letting operators conflate them is exactly the regulatory capture this law was designed to end.
Conservative
That distinction sounds clean, but if compliance is genuinely unprofitable, you're asking operators to absorb losses while they wait for a bureaucratic rate review — and the ones who exit the market first are exactly the marginal operators serving lower-income areas. The person least able to bear it loses their tow service entirely.
Liberal
Then fix the rates — that's a solvable problem. But 'rates might be too low' is not a license to ignore credit card requirements today, and no one has produced a verified cost analysis showing compliance is actually underwater. Until that evidence exists, it's an argument, not a justification.
Rogue few versus systemic framework failure
Conservative
The DMV commissioner himself called this 'a small group of rogue tow companies' — his words, not industry spin. If the problem is a small group, the solution is prosecuting that small group, not layering unfunded mandates onto an entire industry and then expressing surprise when some operators can't absorb them. Connecticut's approach is the regulatory equivalent of banning all restaurants because some have health violations.
Liberal
The 'small group of rogues' framing misses the actual mechanism. The harm under the old statute didn't require bad actors — it required indifferent ones operating within permissive rules that made no demand for credit card acceptance, weekend availability, or advance warning. You don't need villains to run an extraction system. You need a legal framework that enables it, which is exactly what Connecticut had for a hundred years.
Conservative
A century-old statute that was never updated is a real indictment of legislative inertia, not proof that every operator in the industry was running an extraction scheme. Targeting the actual bad actors is more precise, and more just, than treating compliance failure by a few as evidence the whole industry needs sweeping mandates.
Liberal
Precision enforcement only works if there's something to enforce against — and the old law gave inspectors almost nothing to work with. The mandates aren't punishment for past sins; they're the baseline that makes 'targeting bad actors' meaningful rather than theatrical.
Property owner rights versus vehicle owner protections
Conservative
The property rights dimension is being ignored here. When a towing company can't remove a vehicle with an expired registration from a private apartment lot, the rights of the property owner — often a small landlord — are subordinated to the convenience of someone in violation of their lease terms. Private property enforcement isn't predation. It's the mechanism by which property owners maintain the value and safety of their premises.
Liberal
No one in this reform is arguing landlords can't remove unauthorized vehicles — the law regulates how removal happens, not whether it can. Requiring advance notice and credit card acceptance doesn't protect the person violating their lease; it protects the person who gets towed at 2 a.m. and can't retrieve their car on Saturday because no one picks up the phone. Those are not the same person.
Conservative
Process requirements imposed on the tow operator are costs that ultimately fall on the property owner contracting for that service — either through higher fees or reduced operator availability. The landlord with one marginal tow company serving their area loses real enforcement capacity when that company exits the market.
Liberal
If a landlord's enforcement capacity depends on operators who won't answer phones on weekends or accept card payments, that's a fragile arrangement that was always subsidized by the people getting towed. The reform shifts that cost to where it belongs.
Reform design quality and legislative process
Conservative
The DMV commissioner proposed five additional legislative fixes in January 2026, less than four months after the October 2025 law took effect. That is not evidence that reform is working — it's evidence the original reform was underdesigned. No neutral cost analysis of towing company operating expenses was ever publicly released, meaning the rate structure was set without a verified economic baseline.
Liberal
Five follow-on recommendations after a major reform aren't a confession of failure — they're how governance works. The commissioner identifying additional gaps confirms the October 2025 law was a floor, not a ceiling. What the 'underdesigned' framing ignores is that the alternative was another decade of a statute that hadn't moved in a hundred years while the fee-spiral trap kept running.
Conservative
Iterative governance is fine when the first iteration doesn't impose enforceable mandates on an entire industry without the cost data to set them correctly. You can call it a floor, but the operators being prosecuted for non-compliance today are living under the ceiling too.
Liberal
The legislature passed this with bipartisan support after a documented investigation. Waiting for a perfect cost analysis would have been a permanent delay tactic — the same institutional inertia that left the statute untouched for a century. Enforcement now, refinement ongoing, is not recklessness.
License revocation as enforcement mechanism
Conservative
Targeted enforcement against demonstrable bad actors — not industry-wide mandates — is the appropriate response when the commissioner himself says the problem is concentrated. License revocation applied broadly is a blunt instrument that could reduce the number of operators serving lower-income areas, making availability worse for the exact people the law is supposed to protect.
Liberal
A fine that a non-compliant operator can price into their business model isn't a deterrent — it's a tariff. License revocation is the only leverage that makes the law real rather than aspirational, and the fact that some operators have already come into compliance under this threat proves the mechanism works. The ones still ignoring the law aren't being squeezed by economics; they're betting the enforcement won't land.
Conservative
If revocation reduces the operator pool in a given area, the residents you're protecting end up with fewer options — not a safer market. The threat working on some operators doesn't prove it works without collateral damage on others.
Liberal
An operator who comes into compliance under revocation threat is still in the market serving residents. The argument that enforcement itself reduces service assumes non-compliant operators are also the only operators — and in most of Connecticut, that's not the case.
Conservative's hardest question
The argument that unfunded mandates explain non-compliance becomes harder to sustain if it turns out the non-compliant operators are the same ones who were abusive under the old regime — not marginal legitimate operators squeezed by economics, but bad actors who would have exploited any framework. No public compliance audit exists to rule that out, and if that is what the data showed, the cost-based defense largely collapses.
Liberal's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is the unresolved rate question: if DMV-set rates genuinely don't cover the cost of compliance — weekend staffing, credit card infrastructure, warning notice processes — then enforcement without rate correction could drive small legitimate operators out of the market, reducing competition and paradoxically worsening outcomes for consumers. No neutral cost analysis has been publicly released, which means the reform coalition is asking for strict enforcement without having fully answered whether the economics make compliance viable.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Connecticut's towing statute was structurally permissive for over a century and required substantive reform—both sides accept that the pre-2025 legal framework allowed systematic harm to vehicle owners, even if they disagree on whether the solution was correctly calibrated.
The real conflict
FACT DISPUTE: Whether non-compliant operators are marginal legitimate businesses squeezed by uneconomic rate caps (conservative claim) versus the same predatory actors documented by ProPublica under the old regime (liberal claim)—no compliance audit distinguishes between these groups, making this a resolvable but currently unresolved empirical question.
What nobody has answered
If the DMV releases a cost analysis and discovers that compliant weekend availability and credit card infrastructure genuinely do cost more than the current rate structure allows, does Connecticut then raise rates (validating the industry's argument and undermining the reform coalition's moral framing), accept reduced towing capacity in lower-income areas, or impose the deficit as an effective tax on operators—and which outcome actually helps low-income drivers most?
Sources

More debates