In December 2015, the RV Scott Largent lived in was towed away. Six years later, he's still not sure what happened to him.

Largent, a longtime homeless activist in San Jose, said he started living in his trailer home after tough economic times. On December 29, 2015, San Jose police officers arrested Largent for allegedly failing to respond to a 72-hour notice to move his vehicle from a city street. Largent said police booked him into the county jail but dropped the charges. Meanwhile, they towed his RV.

After his release, Largent went to SJPD headquarters and learned he would have to go to a city-contracted towing company, Courtesy Tow Service, and pay storage fees. But homeless and struggling without any of his belongings, Largent said it took him about two weeks to find the trailer yard.

At Courtesy, Largent said she was told her RV had been totaled.

“I was literally starting to cry,” Largent said. "My father's ashes are there, everything he had."

For the past six years, Largent has been fighting for records of what happened to his RV and the property inside it. He has spoken about it at meetings held by the San Jose City Council and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. He was arrested in 2018 for using a megaphone to demand information about his RV outside of the San Jose Police Department.

Last year, Largent was finally able to obtain court records in an active criminal case against him, stemming from his arrests outside the police department, indicating that Courtesy Tow sold his RV in a lien sale. Largent said he doesn't buy that explanation, and no one has told him what happened to the property in his RV.

"I think they just took everything that was there," Largent said, referring to the towing company. Robert Coen, owner of Courtesy Tow and Matos Auto Tow & Transport did not respond to a request for comment.

Towing services

Like other local governments in California, San Jose routinely tows vehicles for excessive parking in one spot, out-of-date vehicle registration, and outstanding parking tickets. But as Largent discovered with the search for his RV, tracking down towing operations in the city is difficult.

SJPD, which authorizes tow vehicles, does not have readily accessible data on the number of vehicles towed in the city. Spokesman Sgt. Christian Camarillo told San José Spotlight that information on the number of occupied mobile homes towed in 2019 and 2020 would have to be obtained through a public records request, saying the office is facing a weeks-long backlog of requests.

In response to a records request, SJPD said tow and seizure data is not regularly recorded in the department's records management system as it is still primarily a paper process. The department attached a list of several hundred seizures from the past three years, but did not include reasons for the seizures.

Camarillo noted that RVs are subject to the same laws for towing regular vehicles, and can be towed for six months expired registration.

“However, we are sensitive to the homeless situation in our city and view it not just as a vehicle but as someone's home,” Camarillo said. “We do our best to mitigate the circumstances and take into account the needs of the people

residing in an RV vs. needing to tow."

High storage fees

A 2018 report from the San Jose city auditor found that contracted companies towed 15,700 vehicles.

That same year, a report analyzing towing practices in 15 major California cities found that San Jose towing companies charge the highest rates for towed vehicle storage. According to the report, towing companies charge $87.50 a day; By way of comparison, the report notes that nearby parking lots and lots charge less than $10 a day. When combined with other service fees, a vehicle owner may owe a towing company $1,562 after just two weeks in San Jose.

Miguel Soto, an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center and a contributor to the towing report, said most cities and municipalities set a "cap" for what towing companies can charge when they impound a vehicle. vehicle in the direction of the city.

"I remember San José had identified the high daily storage fee as a problem in late 2018, but I admit I don't know if they've really done anything about it," Soto told San José Spotlight.

Under San Jose's most recent contract with Courtesy Tow, which extends service through 2022, the storage fee is now $90 per day for exterior lots and $95 for interior lots. Under the same agreement, towing contractors are supposed to provide the city with information on the number of trailers each month, plus the number of vehicles sold at lien sales and the number of vehicles scrapped.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, San Jose also offered financial assistance to tow companies by reducing their contract compensation fee from $41 per tow to $0.

The 2018 city audit notes that the minimum fees for vehicle recovery in San Jose are higher than in other large cities primarily due to the city's high vehicle release fee. Sixteen of the 17 recommendations made by the auditor, including a recommendation for towing companies to submit information on individual trailers on a regular basis, have not been implemented.

Sam Lew, senior communications manager for the San Francisco Bay Area Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, said city-contracted towing companies inflict significant harm on vulnerable residents.

“The bottom line is that cities are paying huge amounts of money to tow companies to tow the vehicles of the poor, leave them in debt or homeless,” Lew said. "In most cases, (cities) are losing money."

Contact Eli Wolfe at [email protected] or @EliWolfe4 on Twitter.