By Michael Owens, TriCities.com
Marion, Va. — If there’s a fender bender, rollover, or car fire in town, the wrecker company most likely to arrive behind police and other rescuers is Marion Frame and Towing.

Emergency dispatchers have called on the company and its associates to cover accidents in the town 308 times since 2007, which is slightly more than the combined total of calls fielded by the 17 other current and former wrecker services during that time period.

“I’ve got a good reputation that’s been established,” company co-owner Tracy Sledd said. “We’re honest people and we’ve towed stuff for people for nothing.”

He bought the business in January after nearly a decade as a wrecker driver for former company owner Marion Frame and Alignment, which lives on only as an automotive repair garage. The wrecker company and the auto repair garage now share the same lot.

But critics complain that Marion Frame’s success is built less on stellar reputation and more on favoritism by the town’s police and emergency rescuers. Sledd and two of his business co-owners are members of the Marion Volunteer Fire Department, and the fire chief is a full-time patrol officer for the Marion Police Department.

Among the critics is Smith Auto Repair owner Ralph Stacy Smith, who argues that a cozy relationship exists between Marion Frame and public officials – and that the relationship hinders police and 9-1-1 policies designed to share the wealth by rotating calls equally throughout the wrecker community.

“They’re taking business away from me,” Smith said. “It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to the other businesses.”

Smith points to experience of a customer and family friend, Kimberly Johnson, who claims police tried to manipulate her choice of tow companies after she hit a deer on Valentine’s Day.

“I asked for Smith’s and the cop said ‘Are you sure you don’t want Marion Frame,’ ”  Johnson said. “I said ‘I’m sure’ and he asked me again.”

Old & New
Most days, Marion Frame and Alignment auto repair owner Dave Thomas can be found in his garage, waist deep in the greasy engine block of a farm truck or other vehicle. His garage is on the edge of Marion’s downtown, bordered by battered cars and tall grass, and less than three blocks from a pair of wrecker companies also marked by heaps of crumpled steel.

For nearly three decades, Thomas ran both the repair and tow truck businesses handed down by his father. But a host of new licensing regulations recently soured him on what he once considered to be a lifelong career.

On July 1, 2009, Virginia’s first licensing regulations by the state’s newly created Board of Towing and Recovery Operators kicked into gear.

And Thomas, leery of buying a licensing sticker for each of his tow trucks, bailed on the profession.

“I said [to a board agent], if you want me to have a yellow sticker, I’ll go to Walmart and buy all the smiley faces you want to put on my wrecker,” Thomas said.

The old Marion Frame answered its last emergency call in the town on July 13, 2009 – roughly two weeks after the new law began. That week, the state towing board warned Thomas to get a license, and then told Smyth County 9-1-1, which handles the town’s emergency calls, to remove his company from the list, board Executive Director J. Marc Copeland confirmed.

After that, Thomas sold the towing side of the business to a partnership comprised of volunteer firefighters Sledd, Dale Dunford and Brent Hester, and local farmer David Testerman.

Dunford, like Sledd, has piloted a Marion Frame wrecker for 10 years, while Hester has spent three years with the company. Testerman is new to the business.

The new Marion Frame towed its first emergency call Jan. 14. Since then, it has fielded 49 percent of the dispatcher wrecker requests in Marion.

The new company has kept pace with its former self, which received 51 percent of all requests from 2007 through 2009.

Longevity, not favoritism, is Thomas’ explanation for why the old and rechristened Marion Frame towing business has fielded slightly more than half of the town’s 603 emergency calls for a wrecker in recent years.

“How are you going to compete against someone that’s been established for 26 years?” Thomas said.

Meat & Potatoes
Wrecks, seizures for criminal investigations and impounds for traffic violations are where the money is made in the towing game. It’s the gravy of the business.

The basic customer call to replace a flat tire or fix an overheated engine comes with a set rate based on whether the pick-up and haul are in town and during normal business hours.

In-town jobs, usually a haul of just a couple of miles, are often a relatively quick affair costing less than $100. Those calls make up the bulk of the wrecker business.

Some calls turn into a charity run where the tow driver changes a flat tire or jumps a dead battery for a family passing through and without cash to spare.

“You’re not going to make money every time that wrecker goes out,” Thomas said.

It’s the 9-1-1 call that drags in the insurance companies, police, and often rescue crews. Hundreds of dollars are wracked up in a single haul. And the bill continues to add up if the car stays on the company’s lot for several days because of damage, or if the police need to keep it for an investigation.

“It takes time to do that, it takes paperwork, it takes people,” Smith said. “That’s all overhead … and you have to charge for the stuff that you use.”

The Numbers Game
Virginia Tech statistics professor Eric Vance said there’s a story to be found in Smyth County’s 9-1-1 wrecker call logs for Marion. He’s just not sure what it is, at least not without polling the town’s residents to see if they have a high degree of customer loyalty for tow trucks.

Simply put, either Marion Frame and its associates receive more than its fair share of calls, the statistician said, or it has a brand name in town as strong as Nike or McDonald’s.

“On the surface it looks fishy, but more supporting evidence would be needed” to know for sure, Vance said.

When Marion police arrive at a wreck, department policy has them ask for the driver’s preference in tow companies. If the driver has none, the officer tells the 9-1-1 dispatcher to pick the next company in line on a rotation list.

“Preferably, use the vehicle owner’s or operator’s choice of towing company,” states the written policy, enacted in 2005. If there is no favorite, the policy suggests that “the officer shall ask the dispatcher to send a wrecker which is next on the list.”

With a rotation policy, the dispatcher, or a computer program, chooses from a revolving list of tow companies designated to field calls in the town. The call for a wrecker goes to the next company on the list. When a company fields a call, it goes to the bottom of the list and the next company in line receives the following call.

If the company next in line is unavailable for some reason, the next wrecker listed gets the call. The company taking the call is then placed at the end of the list and the unavailable company remains at the top for the next call.

If none of the companies on the Marion list are available, the dispatcher will turn to a list that includes every wrecker in the county, and repeat a similar rotation process.

Under this process, every company on the Marion list has the same number of opportunities.

Many Virginia localities use a similar rotation system because it is devoid of preferential treatment, said Gary Critzer, the 9-1-1 coordinator for Waynesboro, a Shenandoah Valley city roughly three hours north of Marion.

“If somebody asks us for a city-approved wrecker, we give them the whole thing … we don’t endorse anybody,” Critzer said.

To get on the list in Marion, the rest of Smyth County, and also Waynesboro, the wrecker company must have been inspected and approved by the Virginia State Police for inclusion on its own rotation list.

The logs for Smyth County’s 9-1-1 center show four types of tow truck calls:

• Owner request – the driver asked for a specific company.
• Rotation – the driver did not have a preference so the dispatcher picked the next company in line on a revolving list.
• Seizure – police confiscated the car as part of a criminal investigation and used the rotation list to decide where to hold the vehicle.
• Other – either the officer needed the nearest wrecker to quickly clear the street, police impounded a car due to a driving under the influence traffic stop, or the situation simply did not fit into the other three categories. The wrecker is not picked from the rotation list.

Interpretations
The Alexandria, Va.-based Towing and Recovery Association of America warns that a telltale sign of favoritism by police and rescuers can be found by looking for unusually high numbers of owner requests.

In other words, the excessive numbers might be a tip that drivers are not the ones requesting a specific company. Instead, police might be deciding which company gets the call and passing it off as an owner’s request.

Marion Frame and its spinoff is the only wrecker service dispatched to accidents in Marion and the rest of Smyth County that has more owner request calls since 2007 than the combined total of the three other call types – rotation, seizure and other. Owner request calls make up 70 percent of Marion Frame’s business in the town through the 9-1-1 service. Factor in Marion Frame’s dispatches to the rest of Smyth County, and its percentage of owner request calls drop slightly to 68 percent.

Bewildered by Marion Frame’s numbers is Shenandoah Valley tow driver Ray Drumheller, a former state towing board associate and a current member of the Virginia Association of Towing and Recovery Operators. Drumheller has hauled demolished vehicles throughout Waynesboro and surrounding Augusta County for 43 years.

“Each tower should get the same amount of owner requests,” Drumheller said. “I can’t see how the company is getting more than anyone else.”

A Bristol Herald Courier review of Waynesboro’s wrecker calls for 2010 show an equal number of calls for the five companies on the city’s rotation list. Nine calls separate the company with the least amount of dispatches from the company with the most.

Drumheller’s decades-old company ranks in the middle of the pack.

Marion Frame, in addition to winning the request segment, also gets the majority of calls to tow vehicles seized by Marion police.

Dispatchers are supposed to refer to the rotation list when picking a company to haul a confiscated car. So, under the list’s even-handed numbers game, each company should have a roughly equal amount of seizure calls.

Yet Marion Frame has been called 16 times since 2007 to pick up vehicles seized by Marion police. Of the two other seizures made during that time, one went to Rogers Towing and the other went to Smith Auto Repair, both in Marion.

Thomas said it’s a matter of lady luck smiling on him and the new towing crew.

“It’s the way the numbers come up,” he said.

Harriet Cooley, executive director of the towing trade association, said the statistics boasted by Marion Frame run counter to what she expects to see with a rotation policy.

“I think there probably is something going on there, but I don’t know what it is,” Cooley said.

Next One Please
For several moments, Marion Police Chief Michael Roberts studied the computer spreadsheet of wrecker calls supplied to him by the Herald Courier.

“I’ve never, in my 28 years here, heard someone say they wanted a wrecker and for someone to say ‘Are you sure you don’t want this one,’ ” he said, referencing the claim by Smith customer Johnson about her Valentine’s Day wreck.

“That would surprise me,” Roberts said.

Smyth County Sheriff R. David Bradley, when queried by the Herald Courier, briefly scanned several sheets of statistical graphs before handing them back to a reporter.

“If it is [favoritism], I don’t know of it,” he said. “I don’t think my men would do something like that.”

Marion Volunteer Fire Department Chief Rusty Hamm said it is the police, and not his firefighters, who request wreckers through emergency dispatch. Nor do his firefighters ever endorse any particular company when responding to an emergency.

Also a Marion cop, Hamm said he has never directed business to Marion Frame.

“I’ll say next on the list or who is closest,” he said. “If I’ve asked for [Marion Frame] directly, it’s been by owner’s request.”

Most of the county’s wrecker drivers refused to discuss the issue.

One driver agreed to talk briefly, but only if his name was withheld from the story. “I’ve been here since 1993 and all I’ve found out is keep your mouth shut,” was all he would say for this article.

Smith, of Smith Auto Repair, is the only wrecker driver contacted by the Herald Courier who openly complained about the statistical discrepancies. He gets riled talking about the possibility of hidden favoritism, and not the rotation list, as the driving force behind a company’s success.

“The only thing [the police and sheriff’s office] ever told me is if you’re on the list you’re going to get called,” Smith said.

How [TriCities.com] Got the Story
Sparked by allegations that police favored a particular tow truck business in Marion the Bristol Herald Courier reviewed 3½ years of data involving accident reports and wrecker calls in Smyth County.

Among the documents collected are the more than 1,500 emergency calls received by Smyth County’s 9-1-1 dispatch since 2007; dozens of reports by Marion and Virginia State Police; and fire department logs collected by the Virginia Department of Fire Programs.

The information was pulled together in a database and reviewed for trends. The data indicates that Marion Frame and Alignment and successor Marion Frame and Towing far outpaced its competitors in calls received.

With the statistical analysis in hand, the Herald Courier set out to answer how a company could jump so far ahead of its competitors, and take a good look at the wrecker business.

 About the Author
Contact Michael Owens at [email protected] or 276/645-2549

Posted with permission of TriCities.com.