Dozens of drivers each day are finding that their vehicles are being towed while they’re visiting a Department of Motor Vehicles branch in Arlington County.
They say they’re the
victims of a towing “scam,” while the local business owner responsible for the towing says the DMV traffic is a threat to his bottom line.
Rachel Batkins, a 27-year-old Arlington resident, recently borrowed a friend’s car to visit the DMV at 4150 S. Four Mile Run Drive. After spending two hours inside, Batkins walked out to find that her car had been towed from the small lot in front of the DMV.
“There was no way to tell you couldn’t park there,” Batkins said of the lot, which has one inconspicuously placed sign warning DMV customers their cars will be towed.
A security guard working at the DMV said he has watched Advanced Towing haul away between 20 and 25 cars a day from the lot for the past several months, calling it a “scam.”
“Sometimes they’ll have two or three trucks here, it’s a serious money-maker for them,” said the guard, who asked not to be identified. The guard said he had been instructed not to warn DMV patrons about the lot.
“DMV does not have authority over property we don’t own or lease,” said DMV spokeswoman Melanie Stokes, who confirmed that the Arlington DMV manager had told security guards not to interfere. Stokes said her agency planned to install new signs warning customers about the lot.
ENC Enterprises, which owns a Chevron station and other businesses surrounding the DMV, pays Advanced to tow cars from the small lot.
Andre Leblanc, an operations manager with ENC, said his profits fell 17 percent several years ago when DMV built the branch there and its customers started filling ENC’s parking spaces.
“I was losing a lot of customers, and it was becoming not only a financial issue but a safety issue for us,” Leblanc said, adding that the problem was largely solved when he started paying Advanced to patrol the lot.
Stokes said the Four Mile Run DMV branch is “one of the busiest in the state”
and provides roughly 125 spaces for more than 185,000 annual visitors.
John O’Neill, owner of Advanced Towing, said the small parking lot’s existing signage exceeds all state and local requirements, and said his company had towed only a handful of cars from the lot this week.
Both O’Neill and Leblanc said they would reassess the location of the sign that seemed to elude so many DMV patrons.
“I’m going to walk the property with the owner and we’ll decide what we can do to make it better,” O’Neill said.
