Study Finds Chicago Boots Cars, Impounds Them and Sells Them... But That Doesn't Pay Down Delinquent Ticket Debt
(WBEZ) According to a WBEZ analysis of thousands of towing records and invoices, the city regularly pulls residents into a nexus of ticket-related debt and car seizures that is stunning in its scope.
In 2017 alone, Chicago booted more than 67,000 vehicles for unpaid tickets. In about a third of those cases, the driver couldn’t afford to remove the boot, and the vehicle was later towed to a city impound lot.
Of those 20,000 impounded cars, more than 8,000 ended up like Botello’s: They were sold off, with the owners receiving none of the sale proceeds. Instead, the city and its towing contractor pocketed millions of dollars, while residents were left with ticket debt.
All told, there have been nearly 50,000 of these sales since 2011.
The vast majority of cars bound in these tow-and-sell operations hail from low-income and minority communities on Chicago’s West and South Sides, where experts have said residents are already hard-pressed to pay for effective transportation.
The city has a term for those who owe ticket money: “scofflaws.” It’s a Prohibition-era term that was applied to those who drank illegally — or flouting the law. City officials use the term regularly, conflating the inability to pay debts with criminal activity.
The road to becoming a Chicago scofflaw can be short, starting with workers or contractors sometimes issuing multiple tickets on the same day — against a city ordinance.
Fines accrued from just two or three outstanding tickets will prompt the city’s revenue workers to boot a car. Owners have just 24 hours to pay $100 to remove a boot; hitting that deadline can be difficult for unemployed or underemployed motorists, or those without access to quick credit. If the window’s missed, the car’s towed, and the owner becomes responsible for a $150 towing fee.
Once at the impound, cars can be sold in as little as three weeks, but not before drivers rack up storage and other fees.
Translation: A small financial hole can open into a massive chasm, as the city assesses fees that build each day.
She moved to Chicago in 2014. She drove her 2003 Lincoln Continental to her South Shore neighborhood and quickly purchased a city sticker and Illinois license plates. The sticker was only valid for three months, so the city prorated the $86 price to $57.
“I tried getting everything in order,” Botello said. “I like following the law.”
But Botello’s first few months were hard; she hadn’t found a job and was on the fence about whether Chicago was going to work out. Even though her son got a scholarship to Mount Carmel High School, a private school, they still had to pay a $400 registration fee.
She chose to pay for the school registration instead of renewing her city sticker.
That’s when the tickets started. Within 45 days, she received five city sticker citations — at $200 each.
Botello said she couldn’t cobble together enough for the sticker, “so I got another ticket, and I was just getting ticket after ticket.”
She eventually bought another sticker, she said, but “they charged me an additional $60 for being late.”
By this point, she couldn’t afford to pay her outstanding tickets on time. The city added late penalties and collections fees, for a total of $2,934.
According to towing data, Botello’s car was booted on March 16, 2015, and towed the following day — with a valid city sticker on the windshield.
Well here’s the least shocking/most infuriating thing of all time. If you have the time, read that entire article. It goes into extreme detail on how the city robs the poor to pay for their poor financial planning. It truly is disgusting.
Look, there are a LOT of pros living in Chicago. But our city’s political culture and financial planning are NOT one of them. Until recently, there was a red light camera at every fucking corner in the city. If you didn’t stop behind the line for 10 seconds making a right on a red, you were undoubtedly burning a $100 bill for the city two weeks later. Everyone’s been there, and it fucking blows. Everyone handles the tickets differently too; some people pay them immediately, some crumple them up and ignore them until they build up, and others have mastered the art of paying just enough tickets to not get booted, but also not pay them all off completely.
I am the middle of those. I let them pile up and said fuck’m, and received a boot.
It was 4 red light tickets at the Jackson/290 exit, a “parking in a bus stop zone” ticket, and two city sticker tickets. Hand up, I didn’t pay the red light tickets. I paid the bus stop ticket immediately to try and stay under the boot threshold, but said fuck it to the rest.
But the fucking city, those fucking assholes, decided to write me a city sticker ticket and boot me when I CLEARLY had a city sticker. The little $150 sticker that the city makes you get just as a ‘fuck you’ for having a car. So I called the city hall finance department, motherfucked them to the moon and back, and guess what they said “we see you actually do have a city sticker on record but you have to formally dispute it with the city or else you have to pay it, and that will cost you more than the ticket itself.”
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Like I said, cock suckers. The whole lot of em. I’m sorry I’m yelling, but I know this story hits home to a LOT of people who own a car in Chicago.
So anyways I paid $954 down and owe $71 on the 27th each month from now through December or they’ll hunt my car down and boot it again.
The worst part was that I couldn’t just pay over the phone; I had to Uber up to Portage Park, which cost $50 round trip, and pay it in person. The ultimate kick in the dick.
** BONUS BOOT STORY **
I purchased a car in April of 2018. 2016 Nissan Altima, nbd. Perfect zip around the city car. Towards the end of summer I went to get money out of the Chase ATM at Damen and Division. Got booted:
This dickhead in the video booted me for leaving the premises on a “private lot” even though I was just getting money out of the ATM so I could use it at the convenience mart who owns the actual lot. Worst human ever, and holy shit did I lay into him.
Moral of the story: Chicago fucking sucks in this regard and needs to figure out how to budget its finances without robbing people through bullshit means.
Obligatory: