Tow job

The tail-end of a night
on the town. It’s 2 a.m. Love is in the air, the air that now occupies the
space where you left your car hours before.

            Towed!

            Your ride has been dragged to an unfamiliar industrial
zone somewhere on the north side. Your evening out, wrecked. You finally find
the dimly lit impound lot, where your car sits behind a chain-link fence,
guarded by barking dogs. An ominous presence extends his meaty palm. “That’ll
be $160. Cash.”

Downtown nightlife: build it
and they will come — and park. As nightspots blossom and flourish throughout
the city, the demand for legal parking spaces also grows. And as parking
becomes an increasingly scarce commodity, some after-dark denizens succumb to
the temptation to park illegally. Cars get towed and their owners are left to
cry the blues.

            Some never come back downtown.

            The city’s parking situation has led to a perpetual blame
game. Club owners point to neighboring landlords unwilling to let patrons use
their lots after-hours. Landlords point to drunken patrons puking on their
asphalt. And patrons point to towing companies, accusing them of unfair fees
and suspicious business practices, like demanding payment in cash.

            Jay Andersen, of Rochester, recently had his car towed.
“I got [to the impound lot] at 2:30 a.m. and had to wait 45 minutes after
searching for an ATM. I wanted to kill this fucking guy,” he says of the driver
who took his ride.

            “We have a considerable amount of people who we lose each
week, that will never come back, because they’re paying over $100 to get their
cars back,” says John Ritter, former manager of two clubs, Red (now Mercury)
and Industry. “I’ve heard from several people, mostly out-of-town people, who
will never, ever come back to these bars.”

            Tow truck drivers take the criticism in stride. The way
they see it, they’re just doing their job, though the job does have its
satisfactions.

            “I’ve seen people screwing. I’ve seen people smoking
dope, smoking crack, guys puking their brains out,” says Steve, a wrecker
driver with Northeast Towing who spoke on condition his last name not be used.
(He says he’s received death threats.) “Obnoxious people with no regard at all
for other people’s property — these are the people we enjoy towing,”
he says. “They get their wake-up call.”

            Finding parking at night has really become a hassle
around some stretches of East Avenue and St. Paul Street, among other places.
And tempers have flared.

            City officials recently held a meeting with
representatives of the roughly 20 towing companies licensed to do business
downtown. The meeting was called in response to a flood of complaints the
police department received from citizens who’d been towed. But according to
Vince Marinaro of Vince Marinaro’s City Auto Service & Repair, the
officials “came to find out that everything that’s being done is actually above
board and legal.”

            What can be done to improve the situation? Marinaro is
stumped. “I don’t see a solution at this point,” he says.

“The biggest problem is these jackasses can’t read,” says Mike Bigelow, a
doorman at the Mercury Star Lounge on St. Paul Street. “That’s why their cars
get towed.” Bigelow estimates that as many as 20 illegally parked cars get
hauled away every weekend night from the area.

            But you can only read what you can see, and some club
owners say the signs downtown just aren’t visible enough. Private lots downtown
“have minor signage,” says John Chmiel, owner of Water Street Music Hall.
Chmiel hopes the city will give the St. Paul Business Association funds to put
up larger, clearer, and more uniform signs in the area next year. But because
most parking lots in the area are private property, that won’t be easy.

            Chmiel has tried to remedy the situation himself, but he
says tow truck drivers have sabotaged his efforts. “If we put up a sandwich
sign on the sidewalk with a warning, they’ll take it, run it over,” he says.
“It won’t last a week.”

            Miguel Millan, an employee of Tapas 177 on St. Paul
Street, has a similar story. “We put out a sign in a five-gallon bucket saying,
‘Don’t park here, you’ll get towed,’ and a tow truck took it away,” he says.

            “We used to put up A-frame signs in front of illegal
parking places, and they’d crush ’em,” says Ritter. “They ran over three
different signs of ours. They ran over all our cones.”

            “You can’t block the lot, you can’t interfere with
people’s business,” says Steve of Northeast Towing. “You start putting up signs
and that’s just gonna aggravate everyone in general. And then it’s gonna make
us want to tear them out or take them down.

            “Obviously, I have to make a living,” he continues, “and
to see nobody park there… A few people have to get towed.”

            Andrea Burke, owner of the Montage Grille on Chestnut
Plaza, understands the wrecker drivers have a job to do, she just doesn’t like
the way they do it. “They’re so aggressive,” she says. “They wait around,
especially if they know we’re going to be busy.”

            Marinaro, a driver himself, agrees. “I don’t really like
how some of these operators are doing it,” he says, “where they’re sitting
there across the street, watching these people park their cars, and they go in
and they take them.”

            It’s a tactic referred to as “bait and shoot.” And in
those situations, tow operators can take a car with the efficiency and speed of
Richard Petty’s pit crew.

            The Montage Grill has a sign posted on its front door
warning that if you’re parked illegally, “you’ll be towed immediately, if not
sooner.”

Most tow victims eventually accept the fact they made a mistake. “It
was my fault,” says Kerry Williams, of Rochester, whose car was towed this
summer. “I saw the sign.”

            “Everyone else was parking there,” says Rochester’s
Rodney Weil. “They all got towed, too.”

            After the trauma and expense of a tow, rarely are there
repeat offenders. “I look at all the signs now,” says Williams.

            But the signs don’t tell the whole story. And that’s when
people get really pissed.

            Officer Jim Tuite, of the Rochester Police Department’s
license investigation unit, monitors the fees tow companies charge. (Maximum
fees for specific services are set by the city’s Treasury Office.) When
citizens complain, “a lot of times they feel they’re overcharged or they feel
the signs aren’t posted well enough,” he says.

            “It often says on the sign the tow company charges $50
for towing,” Tuite continues. “Car owners go get their vehicle, and all of a
sudden, the charge is over $100.”

            As revised — slightly raised, mostly — by the city in
August, the maximum fees include: a $55 base rate, $12 per day for storage, $25
per 30 minutes for winching, $15 for use of a flatbed truck (necessary for
all-wheel drive vehicles), and $31 per hour for the “necessary extra man,”
among other charges.

            Tuite says tow truck operators are “generally pretty
good,” about charging fees only for necessary services. “Once in a while, we’ll
get a complaint from a person who says, ‘They charged me for the necessary
extra man.’ The tow company will say, ‘The car was in a tight spot. We had to
use an extra man.’ Sometimes, in our opinion, one guy could do the tow, but
they charge for an extra man. Basically, it’s their word against ours.”

            “If they can justify it, they can charge it,” Tuite says.
“We try to monitor as much as we can.”

            “Basically, there’s a charge for everything,” Steve says.

            And everything must be paid for in cash.

            “People can stop payment on credit cards,” says Steve.
“If we took credit cards or checks, we’d be in court constantly. We’d be out of
business.

            “We won’t even take money orders,” he continues. “We will
take certified bank drafts.”

“Rapid growth in an area creates parking problems,” says Heidi Zimmer-Meyer,
executive vice president of Rochester Downtown Development Corp., a non-profit
business association. “There is a lag before those problems get resolved, but
they do get resolved.”

            Zimmer-Meyer says business owners have to get “creative”
to solve their parking problems. For example, some offer valet parking or
strike deals with neighboring landlords.

            But for Burke, the owner of the Montage Grille,
creativity isn’t enough. “We’ve tried to arrange something where we would valet
into a lot,” she says. “We would keep it clean. We have insurance and
everything, but they [the lot’s owner, in this case RG&E] wouldn’t talk to
us.”

            “We generally do not make our parking lots available for
liability reasons,” says Power. If there was an accident and subsequent legal
action against RG&E, “it could affect our customers in their RG&E
bills,” he says.

            In other words, if some intoxicated moron splits his head
open on RG&E’s asphalt and Jim “The Hammer” gets a call, we’ll all be
wearing extra sweaters.

            Some business owners suspect landlords are getting a
kickback from the fee collected when vehicles are towed from their property.
“The people that own these buildings in the area are allowing these tow trucks
to survive because they’re making money as well,” says Kevin Herrick, owner of
the Mercury Star Lounge. “It’s greed. It’s not that they’re not welcoming
nightlife; they’re just finding ways to capitalize on it.”

            “That’s absolutely false,” says Marinaro. “There’s no
towing service I know willing to share the money they take in, because it is a
nasty job and it’s becoming an expensive job.”

            “Absolutely not,” seconds Steve. “This job is too
dangerous and costly to be giving money back. The landlords just want the
service.”

            And they don’t want the mess. “When someone uses the lot
during the day, sometimes the night-time crowd isn’t as kind to the property as
they should be,” Zimmer-Meyer says. “They leave garbage, beer cans, or — God
forbid — throw up. People come in the morning and say, ‘Holy cow!'”

            Zimmer-Meyer disputes some club owners’ claims that
downtown’s parking crunch is killing business. “If the joint is jumping and
hot, people will go no matter what the hassle,” she says. “I’ve been stunned to
see how far people will walk to get to a really hot joint.”

            And there’s also the alternative to a crowded downtown: a
deserted urban landscape. “Our view is this is a sign of success,” Zimmer-Meyer
says. “Not to minimize the issue, but these are nice problems to have.”

Senior writer Chris Busby
contributed to this story.

This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2002.