Governor Glenn Youngkin is signing a bill that will help people whose cars have been towed. Currently some operators prohibit people from having access to the stuff that's in the car without paying a fee. Jay Speer at the Virginia Poverty Law Center says he often hears from people in this situation.
"Unless you pay the fee, which is usually around $150 to $200, you can't get your stuff out of the car," Speer explains. "And what happens is sometimes people don't have the fee right away. But they need the stuff that's in the car."
Stuff like car seats, medicine, cell phones or even laptops. Erin Witte is director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America.
"There's also many situations where a tow-truck operator will take your car when they shouldn't have. They may not have had a legal justification to do it," Witte says. "So, the consumer is in a really tough spot when they find out that their car was towed, sometimes by having to call the police because they think that it was stolen and then they go to the tow-truck lot [and] the tow company says you have to pay us before you access your own vehicle."
Now that the bill has been signed, it’ll become a new law on July the 1st.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
