Angelique Benner walked around the corner from her apartment in downtown White River Junction to the town parking lot behind the old American Legion hall, where she immediately noticed something was wrong.
She called Hartford police. “I think my truck’s been stolen,” she told an officer. “It’s missing.”
A few hours later, police called back. Her pickup wasn’t stolen. It had been towed by the town.
Benner, a 39-year-old tax preparer, wasn’t alone in her predicament. On March 1, eight vehicles were towed from the town’s South Main Street lot to make room for snow and ice removal.
Snow and ice storms in February had created an “urgent maintenance issue,” Town Manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis told me. Town officials were concerned that ice build-up had turned the parking lot into a “slip and fall hazard” for pedestrians, she said.
In the week before Operation Snow Tow, as I’m calling it, the town relied primarily on social media to get the word out. But clearly not everyone was in the loop.
The vehicles’ owners have collectively incurred thousands of dollars in towing and storage fees. As of Thursday, one car owner, who owed nearly $900, was still trying to decide between paying up or just turning over his aging vehicle to the impound lot.
“It’s costing some people a lot of money that they don’t have,” Matt Bucy, a Hartford developer and landlord, told me. He made a case at Tuesday’s Selectboard meeting for the town to reimburse the vehicles’ owners. (Three of Bucy’s tenants had vehicles towed from the lot, which has more than 100 marked and unmarked spaces of free 24-hour parking.)
The town had “no legitimate reason” to haul away the vehicles, Bucy said. “It seems like the town didn’t think it through.”
What happened?
In Benner’s case, she usually parks on the street outside her apartment. If the town needs to plow, Hartford police call or knock on neighborhood doors, she told me. (Police can find a vehicle owner’s contact information through an electronic registration search.)
In mid-February, Benner said police called in the middle of the night to have her remove her two vehicles from the street. Her primary car is a 2013 front-wheel drive Hyundai. She also owns a 2010 two-wheel drive Dodge pickup that she brought with her when she moved from out of state to be closer to family.
Benner, who has lived on South Main for three years, moved both vehicles to the far corner of the old Legion lot. Last winter, when she wasn’t using the pickup, she left it in the lot the entire time. “It was never a problem,” she said.
Any thoughts Benner had of getting the truck out the lot ended with a February ice storm. “It was plowed in,” said Benner, who is five months pregnant. “With all the ice, there’s no way I could shovel it out.”
Benner didn’t check on the truck again until earlier this month, which is when she learned it had been towed to Bob’s Service Center, one of three Hartford towing operations the town used to remove cars. By that time, she owed $820, including $600 in storage fees. (Bob’s charges $75 a day.) To get the truck, Benner wiped out much of her savings.
Preston Houck, who lives at 129 South Main, the old Legion building that Bucy transformed into 22 modern apartments and commercial space, also went a week or so before finding that his car had been towed. Houck, a biopharmaceutical engineer, travels a lot for work and drives a company car. He hadn’t used his own car — a 2002 Toyota Camry with 230,000 miles — in a couple of months. “It was half-buried in snow and ice at the back of the parking lot,” he said.
By the time Houck got home from being on the road, he owed $870 to the towing company, Sabil & Sons, which charges a $55-a-day storage fee.
Last week, Houck was mulling Sabil & Sons’ offer to rip up the bill in exchange for the car. But part of him wants the Camry back. “It was my grandfather’s,” he said. “He gave it to me when I went to college.”
Houck said he might only keep the car long enough to donate it to a charity that refurbishes old vehicles and gives them to people in need. “My grandfather would have liked that,” he said.
Last week, I stopped by the three towing services. They all seemed to have reservations about what the town had asked them to do.
Doug Josler, an owner of Sabil & Sons, told me the town gave him a list of three cars to remove. But when he arrived at the lot, one of the cars didn’t appear to be hindering snow removal. He consulted a town official, who agreed the car should stay put.
Jim Lawrence, who helps run Legendary Auto Worx, didn’t think the parking lot had clearly marked tow zones. “I felt bad for having to move them,” said Lawrence, who waived the storage fees on the cars he impounded. “I didn’t think the town had the right.”
Hartford made “somewhat arbitrary decisions on what cars should be towed,” Bucy said in an interview. “It assumed these cars had been abandoned.”
It doesn’t hurt the towed vehicles’ owners that Bucy has taken up their cause. As one of the chief catalysts behind the downtown revitalization effort and a former Selectboard member, he holds a lot of sway in town.
Last week, Bucy showed me a winter parking plan for the lot that town officials had put together in January 2020. It calls for flashing signs at downtown intersections to alert people of any upcoming “declared snow removal event” that would prohibit parking in the lot from midnight to 6 a.m.
But more than a year later, the signs still aren’t up.
To its credit, the Selectboard seems to recognize the town bears some responsibility. It might even have to get out the town checkbook. The board is set to take up the matter at its next meeting on March 23.
“It’s one of those unfortunate situations,” board Chairman Dan Fraser told me. “There was poor communication. The town doesn’t look good, and people are unhappy.”
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.
