Mom lost her car to cashless toll fines on the Cuomo Bridge
Peter D. KramerEditor's note: The implementation of cashless tolling in the Lower Hudson Valley has brought howls of complaints from drivers who have told us horror stories. Some say they’ve never received bills, only to face thousands of dollars in late fees. Others told us about strong-arm tactics of collection agencies, about a faceless system that didn’t seem to care. Here is one of their stories.
SPRING VALLEY - Ashlee Delgado calls her situation “the worst-case scenario” when it comes to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cashless tolling system.
It’d be hard to find a worse one.
“I never received a bill. I never received an email. I never received a memo,” said the 26-year-old mother of two.
Now, thanks to Cuomo's get-tough policy that revokes vehicle registrations for unpaid cashless tolls, Delgado no longer has her car.
It was impounded over a suspended registration, a week before Christmas 2016.
Then — faced with staggering cab fares to get to and from her car-dealership job in Blauvelt, and to run simple errands to the grocery store and laundromat — Delgado couldn’t keep up with the payments.
Her white Nissan Altima, which she named “Paris” (after Michael Jackson’s daughter) and which represented a major step in establishing her financial life, was repossessed, costing her $4,000 and the independence a car represents.
Her credit took a beating.
Just like that, the Yonkers native who has boys age 6 and 3 and custody of her 19-year-old brother and sister, was in a hole she still hasn’t been able to dig herself out of 14 months later. If anything, the hole is getting deeper.
$700 becomes $3,500
The Thruway Authority said Delgado — who lives in Spring Valley and has family in Yonkers — was billed for 140 trips across the bridge that now bears the governor’s father’s name. At $5 a trip, that works out to $700 for trips from April 2016, when cashless tolling began on the old Tappan Zee Bridge, to December 2016, when her registration was revoked.
But in the age of Tolls By Mail cashless tolling, $700 has a not-so-funny way of becoming much more. In Delgado’s case, it became $3,500. That’s how much the Thruway Authority, and its collection-agency partner, said she owes, for toll bills she said she never received in the mail.
There are those who can weather a $3,500 fine and those who cannot.
"Think about the difference between a person who gets the bill and says ‘Oh my God! This is ridiculous. Well, put it on the card and then we’ll fight it out’ and their life goes on," Delgado said. "Versus someone like myself: I’m 26 years old, I have four people that depend on me, one income, my credit’s now shot, and I can’t crawl out of this hole that I’ve now been thrown into."
'I have to take your car'
Delgado’s job is to put people in cars.
She’s now the Internet sales manager at Route 23 Kia in Riverdale, N.J., overseeing a department that contacts potential customers and makes appointments for test drives, and manages the website, marketing, social media and the company’s brand.
In December 2016, she was on her way to work at her Internet sales-rep job at her former employer, Rockland Nissan. She was blocks from work when she got pulled over on Route 303.
“The cop says ‘Do you know that your registration is suspended?’ And I said ‘How can that be?’
“He said ‘I have to take your car. I have to impound it. I gotta take your plates.’ I was beside myself.”
Her car was towed less than a mile and, even though it was stored for 24 hours, she was charged $80 for two days’ storage on top of the $125 tow fee.
“The cops dropped me off, in a cop car, at my job,” she said. “Super humiliating.”
But the humiliation had only just began. Her brother drove from Yonkers to take Delgado to the DMV in Haverstraw.
“I get to the DMV and it goes from bad to worse real quick," she said. "They tell me it’s not even a suspension I can take care of through DMV. It has nothing to do with them. This suspension was put on my registration from the Thruway department specifically and they can only do that when your bill goes over $800.
"When I heard that I’m thinking ‘This is not something I can take care of today, realistically,’" she said.
The DMV wanted money — a suspension fee, new plates, new registration and a fine for operating a vehicle without registration — but couldn't settle Delgado's case until the Thruway bill was dealt with first.
Without a payment-plan option to settle her Thruway debt — an option the collections agency would not consider, she said — Delgado saw no way out.
"There is no card for me to swipe. There are no parents for me to call to borrow the money so I can settle it before it gets worse," she said. "For me, it’s like a crack in the windshield that starts to spider out and web out and little by little gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it affects every single aspect of my life."
'It was my lifeline'
Trips to the DMV can be demoralizing for routine transactions, but Delgado was also dealing with the loss of her car, which had been a sign of her self-worth.
“First thing I bought in my name, my credit, my money down, insurance in my name,” she said. “You know, starting to build my credit and become a real adult. I was very proud of that car and it was my lifeline. I have my two kids. I take care of my little brother since he was 16 and my sister since she was 16. I have legal guardianship of both of them. I essentially have four kids. It’s a lot of running around.”
Her boss had helped her arrange the loan, a helping hand she appreciated.
"I was blessed to have gotten in that car. I paid that car like a champ," she said.
The Altima, which she bought in February 2016 and lost one year later to repossession, made things better for her family.
"That’s how I got my son to soccer. That’s how I got my kids’ haircuts. It’s how I did laundry. It’s how I got my brother to school, my brother to work," Delgado said. "Everything we had going on depended on that car."
Losing it, over cashless tolls, "took me a thousand steps back." She could no longer afford the cab fare to get her son to and from soccer, so he had to give it up.
Cabs add up.
To try to straighten things out, Delgado shuttled via taxi between the DMV in Haverstraw and the police station, to get the paperwork to prove that the plates had been taken and the car was no longer on the road.
"I got a Christmas bonus and it all ended up just going towards cabs," Delgado said. "Because I then had to find a way to work every day."
It cost her $36 a day to get to and from work in Blauvelt, $180 a week for a job that paid $500 a week.
She was spending a lot of time at the DMV. The fare from Spring Valley to the DMV in Haverstraw was $30. Cab from Haverstraw to Nyack to the police station for a copy of a report: $40. Cab back to DMV: $40. Cab from Haverstraw to Spring Valley: $30.
“It was a pretty penny for that,” she said.
A lot of pretty pennies have been spent trying to resolve this.
By a quick reckoning, Delgado has paid more than $200 in taxi fares to resolve the registration issue, $200 in towing and storage for her car, a $200 suspension fee for the DMV. Not to mention the $895 she still owes the DMV and the $3,500 in toll-violation fees.
But the prettiest penny spent is the loss of her car and the independence it gave her.
'Hysterical in the DMV'
A DMV representative could tell her what she owed immediately. When she called the Thruway, it was another story.
“They said it’ll be up to 48 hours just to find out the balance, which is incredible to me. I have a database of hundreds, if not thousands, of customers and I can look up any of their balances at any time.”
When a Thruway representative finally got back to her, two days later, Delgado was, not surprisingly, at the DMV. The Thruway had news for her: She owed $3,500 in toll violations.
“Oh, my God! I think I dropped my phone," she said. "I was back at the DMV, thinking ‘I’m going to take care of this today. I’ll make an arrangement, make a downpayment and take it from there.’ That was not even an option.
"It takes a lot to shut me up but I was speechless. I broke down, basically, right there in front of everybody, hysterical in the DMV, just thinking ‘What am I going to do? How can I possibly come up with this money?’"
Her boss offered to advance Delgado $1,500 toward what she owed. But the Thruway isn’t in the installment-plan business. It wanted more.
"They told me I had to pay at least $2,200 just to lift the suspension. And, again, that wasn’t including the $895 for the plate fee, plus the suspension fee, plus the new plates. I was so far off, it just wasn’t attainable. It might as well have been a million dollars. It was just impossible."
No bill number to look up
The Thruway Authority says if customers like Delgado don't receive their bills, it's because they haven't contacted the DMV to report changes in their address.
Matthew Driscoll, the Thruway's acting executive director, told The Journal News/lohud's Editorial Board last month that drivers are required by law to alert the DMV about a change of address within 10 days of moving.
Asked if it's possible she missed the bills in the mail, that they came without her noticing, Delgado is adamant. "No. No way," she said.
That said, she has moved, and her driver's license address is not up to date. Nevertheless, she was careful to have her mail forwarded, and to check with relatives whose address she has used as her permanent address.
As for not being billed all those months while using the bridge, she chalked it up to the system being new. Maybe they were billing every three months, she thought.
"I thought it was weird," she said. "I tried to log on to the website because usually you can check tickets there, but you had to have the bill number. And since we never had a bill, there was no bill number to look up."
When she asked the collection agency which address the bills were sent to, "at first they couldn’t tell me."
They told her they sent it to an address on her license. Another time they told her it was sent to where the vehicle was registered.
That address, in New Hempstead, is her uncle's home, she said. She registered her car at that address 10 months before her car was impounded, but she says no violation notices were delivered there.
Cashless tolling began on the Tappan Zee Bridge in April 2016, before the new Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge opened, but it took months for those first bills to go out.
Delgado said she didn't receive a single bill until after her car was impounded for unpaid tolls. She only received a tally of her tolls — and the accompanying fines — when she investigated why her cashless tolling story had gone so horribly wrong.
She would have preferred to keep doing what she had been doing: paying as she went, handing a $5 bill to a toll-taker for each trip. But that option was taken away with cashless tolling.
Even faced with playing catch-up with her bills, she could have paid the $700 she owed in tolls, she said.
"My boss was going to give me a $1,500 advance if it meant me getting my car back right away and not having to go through all this, so I could have gotten money, for sure, if only I’d gotten the bill.
"That’s the craziest part of all. It wasn’t negligence on my part. Had I gotten bills in the mail to begin with, I could have simply paid them. But I never got that opportunity. Instead, I ended up having to repo my car because I couldn’t afford both the cabs and the car note."
Falling behind
The cabs were eating up her earnings. Utilities had to wait. By February 2017, she owed $200 for lunches at her kids' schools. Then the bank came for the car.
"Before I knew it I was making payment arrangements with every account I had trying to keep up and everything kept building and building."
The one payment arrangement that would have helped the most, Delgado said, was the one she said she asked for but didn't receive, the one from the collection agency to let her keep her car and make payments on what she owed.
Delgado took a better-paying job in New Jersey, making $800 a week, but one that meant a longer, more expensive $50-a-day round-trip cab fare.
"It’s a vicious cycle and the worst part is I was put in this position by the very state I was born in, that I grew up in, that I contribute to, that I pay taxes to."
The hole Delgado talks about gets deeper. And she's stuck.
"Because I don’t have good credit, all those beautiful places I see in Jersey that are 10 times bigger than this that have way more amenities and a better school district, I can’t live there. Why? Because of my credit.
"So instead, here I am, in one of the poorest towns in the county of Rockland. I live in a neighborhood that’s considered underprivileged and my son goes to a school district that has been in a battle with Albany for years over corruption and lack of funding.”
Haves and have-nots
A bill should not be a sentence, she said.
After a drumbeat of lohud articles, the Thruway last month announced an amnesty program for those facing Tolls By Mail fines. The Thruway's Driscoll says the program will cover those violations racked up from April 2016 to January 2018, including those in collections.
It's something Delgado is looking into, she said, but it comes in the car-business' slowest month, when commissions are slim.
Still, she doesn't want to miss a chance to make the dark cloud go away, even though the damage to her credit has been done.
"That bill, that cashless toll catastrophe, that mistake on their part, it cost me way more than I owed," Delgado said. "They took a lot more than $3,500 worth, already."
"Being in sales, especially, I can always work something out. I can always negotiate something and figure it out. But this? They don’t budge. There’s no moving them. Not with emotion, not with monetary consequences. They don’t care. They should."
About this investigation
Reporters at lohud and The Journal News have spent three months investigating cashless tolls to find out why drivers are getting fees and escalating fines for tolls for which many say they were never billed, who's running the system and where the system is breaking down.
The reporting so far has prompted changes, including:
- an amnesty program forgiving thousands of dollars from individual bills;
- a new web page for the amnesty program instead of using the faulty Tolls By Mail site;
- more distinct envelopes so drivers know they've received a bill;
- new toll signs on the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge;
- and more responsiveness from Thruway officials, two of whom attended a lohud forum on cashless tolling and personally helped drivers with their individual cases.
Has this happened to you? Tell us your story. Email digital@lohud.com with the subject line "cashless tolls" or call 914-510-2181 and leave a message.
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