For as long as you can remember, the city in which your towing company is located has used only one company – not yours – for all of its police-dispatched, nonconsensual tows. Your company is equally qualified to perform police towing work – you have the equipment, experience, insurance, etc. – so you ask the police chief to start using your company on a rotating basis with the current tow company. The chief says that he is satisfied with the service he is getting and denies your request.

It is not uncommon for tow companies to complain that a City, State, or Law Enforcement Agency is discriminating against them because the tow company is not a resident of the City, State, or Law Enforcement Agency’s jurisdiction. In fact, laws requiring a tow company to be a resident in order to perform law enforcement towing are common.

Most municipal bid contracts contain something like the following: “ABC City demonstrates a continued commitment to the success of minority and women owned (MBE, WBE) businesses by promoting contracting opportunities for vendors certified DBE/WBE.”

Not too long ago I was hired by a tow company that had recently spent thousands of dollars on another lawyer whom the tow company hired to try and get them on a law enforcement tow rotation. The other lawyer was a general business lawyer without any experience representing tow companies. The other lawyer wrote the law enforcement agency a long (and expensive) letter threatening all sorts of things if the law enforcement agency did not promptly allow the tow company on the tow rotation.

It all starts with a plan. When a tow company has a beef with a city, state, or any other kind of governmental agency, the first thing I usually recommend is that the tow company send a sunshine law request to the offending governmental agency. A sunshine law request, or open records request, is a law requiring certain proceedings of government agencies to be open or available to the public. Though there are exceptions, sunshine laws basically require that a government allow members of the general public to view certain documents.