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If you do private property impound work in Anne Arundel County, there is something you need to know. As of January 1 of this year, all private tow companies operating in the county are required to log their private property impounds through the Autura PPI portal, which stands for Private Property Impound. This is a web-based reporting system that the county uses to track vehicles towed from private property and to give vehicle owners a way to locate their car and get an estimate of fees.

Anne Arundel County has been using Autura for its police-initiated towing dispatch since 2018, when the county awarded Autura a contract to manage dispatch and impound services for the Anne Arundel County Police Department. The extension of that system to private property impounds is a newer development and it changes the administrative side of doing nonconsensual tows from parking lots and private roads in the county.

The way it works is that when you tow a vehicle from private property in Anne Arundel County, you are now required to log into the Autura PPI portal and enter the tow. The county published instructions for towing companies along with a letter explaining the procedure changes. Vehicle owners can then go to autura.com or call a customer service line at 301-468-7342 to locate their vehicle and see a fee estimate before they even show up at the lot. Complaints and questions from the public about towing in the county go to towing@aacounty.org or to the Department of Inspections and Permits Licensing section at 410-222-7788.

I have mixed feelings about systems like this. On one hand, the transparency piece is useful. When someone can look up their vehicle online and see what the fees are before they drive over, it tends to reduce the confrontation at the window. That part I do not mind. Nobody enjoys an argument with someone who was not expecting the number they are about to pay.

On the other hand, adding a required digital reporting step to every private property tow means more time on the administrative side of each job. If you are doing volume, that adds up. The portal has to work correctly and the county’s system has to be accessible, and like any software it is not going to be perfect every time.

If you are operating in Anne Arundel County and have not yet gone through the setup process for Autura PPI reporting, that is now overdue. The county’s towing page has the instructions and a link to the web portal. Getting your account set up properly before you need it is a lot better than trying to figure it out after you have already completed a tow and need to log it.

This kind of digital reporting requirement is probably going to spread to other Maryland counties over time. Anne Arundel is not the only county using Autura, and the push toward electronic record-keeping in towing has been building for a few years now at both the county and state level.

A new law went into effect in Maryland on October 1, 2025 that changes how towing companies are required to notify vehicle owners after a tow. I want to walk through what it actually says because I think there is some confusion out there about what changed and what did not.

The law is HB191, which was also introduced in the Senate as SB40. It passed the General Assembly unanimously earlier in 2025 and was signed into law by Governor Wes Moore. The Towing Recovery Professionals of Maryland, which is the state’s main industry association, supported the bill and actually helped shape how the notification process was going to work.

Here is the problem the law was trying to fix. Under the old rules, a towing company that took a vehicle was required to notify the police within one hour and then send written notice to the vehicle owner by certified mail within seven business days. Seven business days is a long time. The Consumer Protection Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office testified during a House Environment and Transportation Committee hearing in Annapolis in January 2025 that this process was leaving vehicle owners not knowing what happened to their car for up to a week. That is frustrating for owners and it creates more storage fees building up in the meantime, which leads to complaints directed at us.

What HB191 does is require towing companies to notify the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration electronically after any tow. The MVA then sends an email notification to the vehicle owner using whatever email address the owner has on file with the MVA. If the owner does not respond within seven days, the certified mail process still kicks in as a backup. So the old mail requirement did not go away entirely. It is now a fallback rather than the first step.

One thing the Towing Recovery Professionals of Maryland worked out with the MVA during the interim period before the law passed was that the MVA would send the notification using its own records rather than having towers handle owner email addresses directly. That matters for privacy reasons and it also puts the responsibility for contact information accuracy on the MVA rather than on us.

From a practical standpoint, what this means for our operation is that we now have an electronic reporting step that has to happen after every tow, not just police-initiated ones. The notification has to go to the MVA, and that system has to be in place and working before we pull out of the lot. That adds a small amount of time on the administrative side of each call.

I think the law is reasonable overall. Most of the time when someone’s car gets towed they find out quickly because they go looking for it and it is gone. But there are situations where people park somewhere, come back much later, and genuinely have no idea what happened. An email notification that goes out within a few hours is better than a certified mail letter that arrives a week later. It reduces the number of phone calls we get from confused owners and it cuts down on storage disputes because people know sooner and can act sooner.

If you are running a towing operation in Maryland and have not yet set up your MVA electronic notification process, that is something to get sorted out. The law is now in effect and the reporting obligation applies to all companies towing in the state.