To my understanding, this committee was created because of major concerns with private property towing.  It seems to have snowballed into something much more.  I feel that there are many things in this industry that could or even should be regulated. However, with the current "working papers"(thanks to a previous comment I was able to find), and the regulations open for public comment tomorrow, 2/11/08, the board seems to be going much more beyond having general standards to something more of a dictatorship.

What happened to the public being able to choose with whom they do business? Why is this portion of towing being so heavily regulated, for example, all of the training requirements?  If we did not know how to do our jobs, we would not be able to get insurance. So, why do we have to constantly prove our worthiness?  If we don't know how to do our jobs it will eventually catch up with us as far as insurance companies are concerned. If we were surgeons, we would not have to show the state documents of up-training every year, surgeons would not be able to get insurance if they were not qualified. Let our ability to attain insurance serve as the standards for the industry as far as training is concerned and make, as it has been written, minimum insurance requirements.  If this is just too incomprehensible, then let us simply take tests every five years or so to pass the license requirements.  We don't even have to have annual training or have to retest for our drivers licenses every year! How can we, as a group, truly decide what classroom and hands on training minimum requirements we have to have every year when a lot of us know the business from living it? I personally don't feel like paying my extremely hard earned money for training that I already have on top of the thousands of dollars that I have to spend every year on insurance.

Making sure, as an industry, that companies have insurance, have equipment that is rated for the type of service that we provide, and by making sure we are held accountable for the jobs that we do and how we will be accountable for those jobs is basically all this board should be doing. It would also be acceptable to take it a step further in regulating who is allowed to provide public service towing in regards to police and non-consensual towing, i.e. no sex offenders, murders, setting lot hours, lot requirements, what forms of payment have to be accepted and/or even truck requirements. But most of these should not be for the general practice of towing. We, as citizens of the United States, have the right to choose with whom we do business.   

These are my general thoughts of the whole system.  As far as some of the specific line items in the documents that are being composed, I have comments and concerns there but will address those separately.  We can't let this board take over if it suppose to be a representative us all of us!