Skip to content

'Predatory towing scourge': Bylaw in the works to deal with Bronte problem

Aggressive towing practices in Bronte’s private parking lots could come to an end next year, with a new town bylaw requiring all vehicle removals to be approved by a town employee or a Halton police officer.
TowTruck
Tow Truck

On a recent Thursday evening, Kylie Wilson watched tow trucks come for three cars parked in Bronte’s Centriller Square lot.

It was 7:30 p.m., more than two thirds of the plaza’s businesses were closed and there were only 18 cars in the lot with capacity for 150.

The three towed vehicles may have been improperly parked. Possibly they were on the wrong side of the lot’s property lines for the business they visited. Maybe they wandered from one business to another, or down to the lake, without moving their car.

They may simply have had the bad luck of being wrongly targeted by what Bronte Village Residents Association president Harry Shea calls Bronte’s "predatory parking scourge."

For Wilson, executive director of the Bronte Village Business Improvement Area (BIA), which represents 175 local businesses, it was a familiar scene in a towing "epidemic" that has plagued the community in recent years.

Business owners have been forced to hire staff to help ensure customers are parked in the right places, compensate wrongly towed customers with gift cards and endure frequent social media calls for the boycott of Bronte businesses, she told town councillors at their July 9 meeting.

"Predatory towing from private property has created an unfair problem for our small businesses to deal with," said Wilson. "It looks like a heavy-handed tactic that’s not benefitting the businesses that it claims to serve."

A remedy may come in the form of a new town bylaw under development.

That bylaw will require a town employee or Halton police officer to approve all vehicle tows.

Details on how the program will be administered, and how much it will cost, are to be worked out in the coming months.

After discussions with Halton police, town staff will develop a towing bylaw and process. Those rules will be presented to councillors by the end of the year.

That deadline was added after Ward 1 councillor Jonathan McNeice stressed the urgency of the problem.

He said it isn’t easy for visitors to determine where they may and may not park and there is no grace period for those who have made an innocent mistake.

Restaurants ask arriving diners where they are parked, but people who return to move improperly parked cars often find they have been towed within five minutes.

"There is a culture of fear when it comes to visiting Bronte," said McNeice, who noted that the area is seeing six tows a day or 200 each month.

A previous town bylaw tried – with limited success – to curb aggressive towing practices through oversight of the towing industry.

But new provincial rules, in place since January, have removed the town’s ability to control towing companies.

Read more: New year brings new towing rules

Councillor Sean O’Meara said the new rules won’t stop private property owners from being able to remove cars that park illegally, but will create a process for towing.

"I think we all acknowledge that people need to follow the rules, especially on private property," he said. "But this is a bad actor and a bad apple and I think (the new bylaw) will help rectify this."



Comments