Issues With Getting Your Vehicle Back From the PPA
If you've ever had your car booted or impounded by the Philadelphia Parking Authority (“PPA”) and do not feel you were treated fairly, feel free to contact me for a legal consultation. I have sued the PPA before, and I would like to do so again. The PPA has various practices that are potentially illegal.
The PPA makes it unreasonably difficult to challenge your tickets after your car is booted or impounded. Payment constitutes a guilty plea, yet you're forced to pay to get your car released. By ordinance, the PPA is supposed to release your car immediately upon posting a bond for the amount of the tickets, yet in practice the PPA has no procedure for accepting bonds, and does not tell people they can post a bond.
By ordinance, the validity of your tickets is not subject to dispute in the expedited post impoundment hearing. The subject of that hearing is limited to whether there was probable cause for an impoundment, not the validity of your tickets or the amount you have to pay for the return of your car. If you want to challenge the tickets or any of the fees, costs, and charges you have to pay to get back your car, the ordinance instructs that you have to wait for a hearing on the merits in due course, which is going to be several weeks, probably about a month, Yet, you probably cannot wait several weeks for the return of your car, and the PPA will assess storage charges against you of about $30 a day. The PPA will probably not tell you there is a separate hearing track for challenging the amount you owe.
You won't have to pay for storage if you successfully challenge the tickets, but why would you take the chance when the storage fee will add up to hundreds of dollars during the time it takes to have a hearing? You also might only want to challenge some of the tickets or charges, but not all of them, in which case you’ll still have to pay the full storage charges, which will likely discourage you from challenging any of the tickets.
If a car owner ends up having a dispute with the PPA over the validity of their driver’s license, registration, proof of insurance, days in storage, or weight classification of the vehicle, there is apparently no hearing for these disputes in the PPA procedures. By ordinance, the subject of the expedited post-impoundment hearing is limited to probable cause and nothing else, and the hearing on the merits is limited to the validity of the tickets.
These are unfair practices that may violate a car owner’s right to due process by putting undue pressure on owners to pay fines and charges they do not owe.
Payment Plans
The PPA will allow car owners to enter into a payment plan for the return of their cars, but the PPA will require a lump sum down payment before approving the plan. The down payment will either be 25% of the balance or 50% of the balance, with the rest due in 12 monthly installments. The repayment terms will be set without consideration of the car owner’s ability to pay, which might violate the equal protection rights of lower income car owners who cannot afford these terms.
Post a Bond To Get Your Car Released
Section 9-2406(3) of the Philadelphia Code states:
The owner or any person on behalf of the owner may obtain immediate release of the vehicle by posting a bond equal to the amount of the unpaid parking tickets issued to any and all vehicles registered in the name of the owner of the vehicle that is to be recovered, booting and/or towing fees and accrued storage fees. Such bond shall be obtained in order to ensure the alleged violator's appearance before a Parking Hearing Examiner as set forth in Chapter 12-2800 and shall be held as collateral until a hearing on the underlying parking violations is completed and a determination of liability is made pursuant to Chapter 12-2800.
The ability to post a bond for the return of your car is the only means the law provides for a consumer to get back their car while they challenge the legality of any of their parking tickets or calculation of any fees, costs, and fines. Without the ability to post a bond, consumers are basically coerced into paying whatever the PPA demands because there is no other way to get back their car, and storage charges will accumulate if you choose to wait for a hearing on the merits.
As far as I can tell, the PPA does not appear to have any procedure to allow for the posting of a bond, and if you tell them you want to post a bond for the return of your car, I anticipate that the front line staff will not know what you’re talking about, and tell you posting a bond is not an option.
If the PPA does allow you to post a bond, another problem relates to how much of the bond has to be secured by a cash payment. A bond is a debt instrument, a promise to pay. A bond can be secured by an asset, but does not have to be. Tickets are all secured by the vehicles owned by the driver, and perhaps the PPA does not need any more security than that, but one interpretation of the ordinance could be that the car owner has to pay the amount of the bond in cash in a lump sum to be held as additional security by the PPA.
In that event, however, if the PPA requires payment of the full amount of the bond in cash as security without any consideration of the car owner’s ability to pay, that could represent unconstitutional coercion to force the car owner to waive their due process right to a hearing. The PPA will let the driver get their car back in exchange for admitting liability and entering into a payment plan. The PPA does not let drivers enter into a payment plan on less than all of their tickets at one time.
In any event, I wrote a bond form that you could try to use to obtain the release of your vehicle. Click HERE to download a copy. This bond is a promise to pay the full amount of the debt with only the vehicle acting as collateral.
Feel free to print this form, fill it out specifying the car to be released, the amount of the bond, and other designated information, and present it to the PPA asking for your car to be released. I anticipate that the PPA will tell you they are not going to release the car, but the PPA’s failure to follow their own ordinance could also be the basis for a lawsuit. Give me a call and tell me what happened.
Illegal Automobile Towing, Impoundment, and Sales by the Philadelphia Parking Authority
The PPA May Have Overcharged You.
If you had a car towed and sold by the PPA, it is possible the PPA made several errors for which you might be able to seek redress. They may not have given you accurate notification of how long you had to retrieve your car, and most importantly, they may have overcharged you.
You won’t know whether you were overcharged until you review the petition the PPA files with the court of common pleas to obtain authorization for the sale of your car. That petition, which is filed secretly, states the amount of money the PPA is seeking for each car they auction, and that number can differ from the amount the PPA asks you to pay. I have seen this when reviewing these petitions and comparing them to the sums requested. I would be happy to review your circumstances and see what I can find for you.
The obligatory warning is for you not to rely on the information on this website as legal advice. Every case is unique. Contact me to discuss the facts of your individual situation. Robert.Salvin@outlook.com. 215-300-2388.
When contacting me, please try to have as much documentation as possible available about the impoundment, including copies of tickets, printouts of tickets from the PPA, the PPA’s impoundment letter that they should have sent you right after picking up the vehicle, boot documents, and anything else. Email them to me.