ESCONDIDO MAN DELVES INTO MYSTERY TOLLS ON CAR HE HAD SOLD
Fees racked up by driver in Bay Area on vehicle he hadn’t owned in 11 years
The first notice arrived in Jim Okerblom’s Escondido mailbox in mid-December. It said he owed a $6 toll for driving his car across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area on Nov. 30.
Except Okerblom hadn’t been in the Bay Area on Nov. 30, or any time at all recently. And he didn’t own the car involved. He’d sold it almost 11 years ago.
So began a bureaucratic runaround that might have made Kafka proud.
Almost every day brought a new notice in the mail — 10 then 40 then 70. Somebody up north was getting a free ride, intentionally or otherwise, as he or she commuted regularly across the Richmond-San Rafael and other Bay Area bridges. Toll plaza cameras took pictures of the front license plate as the car passed through. And then Okerblom got the bill.
In June of 2010, when he sold the blue 1999 Chevy Camaro, he filled out a Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability form, as required by state law, and mailed it to the Department of Motor Vehicles. That was supposed to clear him of responsibility for tickets or fines incurred by the new owner.
It didn’t do the 68-year-old retired journalist much good, though, when
he sent copies of the form to Bay Area FasTrak, the toll-collecting agency, and to the DMV.
FasTrak said DMV records still listed him as the registered owner of the car, and that as long as that was the case, the toll notices would keep coming his way. He was told to appeal the levies, one at a time, a painstaking process since each involves typing in a unique 14-digit invoice number.
He contacted the DMV, which said there was nothing it could do, that its records showed ownership of the car had never been transferred. It was up to the buyer of the Camaro to re-register it, and he apparently never did.
This is a civil matter between private parties, a DMV investigator wrote in a letter. She suggested Okerblom might want to hire an attorney and sue the buyer.
Okerblom did not want to hire an attorney. He had no idea where the buyer was, or whether he still owned the car. And how long would it take to resolve this in court?
He wrote to the California Highway Patrol for help, thinking maybe an officer could watch for the car since the toll notices showed it crossed the bridge at roughly the same time every day. He expressed concern about being held responsible for accidents or crimes involving the car, and was worried about the damage to his credit rating from unpaid bills.
In the letter, his frustration bubbled over: “I live in Southern California, hundreds of miles away from violations on a car I haven’t owned in more than a decade!”
More dead ends
What made this even more maddening is that Okerblom had been through it before. With the same car.
He’d bought the Camaro around 2005 for his son, Tyler, who was a student at UC Davis. When the car threw a rod and needed expensive repairs, they decided to sell it.
A Concord resident named Hector bought it on June 6, 2010, for $600. Tyler remembers him arriving with a tow truck and hauling it away. Okerblom signed over the pink slip and filled out of the Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability of Form, listing his name and address, as well as Hector’s name and address.
A few weeks later, Okerblom started getting notices about unpaid bridge tolls linked to the car. (A camera takes a picture of the front license plate as the car goes through the toll plaza. Drivers are supposed to pay up in a couple of days, either online or over the phone, and if they don’t, a notice goes out in the mail to the registered owner.)
Then the car was impounded and towed because the driver, stopped by police for some reason in Concord, was unlicensed. Okerblom received a bill for $3,000 in tow-yard fees, then threats from a collection agency.
He got all that straightened out by sending off copies of the Notice of Transfer form. And he figured he was done with the blue Camaro. Until three months ago.
As the new notices came into his mailbox, Okerblom slipped into journalist mode. He had worked for the Union-Tribune as a reporter and editor for 26 years.
He called the tow yard where the Camaro had been impounded back in 2011 to see if anyone there knew anything about what happened to the car. They didn’t.
He called the Sheriff ’s Department here, thinking that if the guy who bought the Camaro, Hector, had never re-registered it, maybe he could report the license plates as stolen and someone would investigate the whole thing. No, a deputy told him.
He also looked up on Google Maps the address Hector had given him while buying the car. Okerblom knew Hector didn’t live there anymore; a letter he’d sent earlier came back as undeliverable. Through Google Maps, he found a phone number for the place and called. They said they’d never heard of Hector.
The invoices, meanwhile, kept coming. Okerblom appealed them all. Then one caught his eye. The invoices typically include a photo of the license plate. But this one had a more expansive view that included part of the hood.
On the hood was the manufacturer’s ornament, the distinctive “H” of a Honda.
How did the license plate from a Chevy Camaro wind up on a Honda?
At first mystified, Okerblom grew excited. Here, he thought, was clear proof that he had nothing to do with those unpaid bridge tolls. It wasn’t even the same car!
He contacted the DMV again, talked to the investigator who had turned him away before. Her response: “There’s nothing we can do.”
A solution
There was something they could do.
When the Union-Tribune called the DMV last week, the Office of Public Affairs said it would look into the matter. It asked for contact information for Okerblom.
The next morning, he got a phone call from the investigator, who told him she had looked further into his situation and discovered that somehow information from the Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability form he sent in back in 2010 had been “purged” from the computer system.
That’s why he was still showing up as the registered owner, the investigator said. The records were fixed, Okerblom was told, and FasTrak will no longer be sending him bills for unpaid bridge tolls.
Later that day, another DMV worker called him. She apologized, Okerblom said, and reiterated that the problem should be fixed now.
The DMV declined a UnionTribune request for an interview about what happened. In an unsigned email response to questions, the agency cited a recordkeeping mistake.
Asked what other people should do to make sure they don’t get caught up in something like this, the DMV pointed to its website, which includes a section on filling out the Notice of Transfer form.
It explains, however, that even filling out the notice doesn’t remove a car seller from the vehicle’s ownership record. That only happens when the car buyer re-registers it in his or her name.
How often does a car buyer fail to re-register a car? “While it’s very rare,” according to the CarGurus website, “some car shoppers may try to take advantage of the situation by choosing not to register a car after purchasing it, saving them not just the cost of the registration, but also potentially from the penalties of parking tickets, traffic tickets, and possibly other crimes.”
It recommends filling out a bill of sale, having both parties sign it, and keeping a copy of it, as well as copies of other relevant documents. Some websites recommend completing the sale at a DMV office, where both parties could make sure the care gets re-registered.
CarGurus also notes that some states require the license plates of a car to be turned in when it is sold, and new ones issued, a further protection for the seller. California is not one of them.