Baca County Vehicle Impound Guide

Baca County's only impound lot is closed on Sundays, which turns any Saturday-night DUI arrest into an automatic two-day storage bill. A car towed at 11 p.m. Saturday sits until the owner can get there Monday at 9 a.m., even if bond gets posted Sunday morning. Colorado's storage rules bill by the 24-hour period or any portion of one, so that closed Sunday counts as a full paid day regardless of when the car actually gets picked up.

The lot itself is Jeff Woller Auto Parts & Towing, at 27503 US-287, which is also the county's working auto parts and repair shop, not a dedicated impound facility. That matters because the same staff releasing a car are also running the parts counter and service bay, and a paying repair customer often gets handled first. Posted hours run 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, but a rural shop with a skeleton crew frequently narrows to one person during the lunch hour, noon to 1 p.m. Arriving then can mean waiting for that one staffer to finish with a customer already at the counter.

Storage runs about $47.12 a day, on top of a base tow fee around $279.78 and a $150 notification-letter fee. Paying by credit card adds a surcharge of 3 to 5 percent under Colorado law, so cash or a debit card avoids that markup; the lot also takes Com Checks. After-hours release, if the shop agrees to it at all, adds a gate fee of roughly $103.70 just to open up outside posted hours.

Anyone searching online for towing in "Springfield" needs to double-check they've landed on Springfield, Colorado, area code 719, zip 81073, and not Springfield, Missouri, a much larger city whose towing companies show up constantly in the same searches. Calling the wrong one wastes time that matters when a car is racking up daily storage charges.

The registered owner has to be the one picking up the vehicle. If that person is still in custody, a family member needs a notarized letter of authorization, and finding a notary open on a weekend in Springfield is close to impossible. In practice, this can mean the car simply waits in the lot until the owner is released. There's also no way to walk from the jail or courthouse to the impound lot; it sits several miles out on US-287 with no transit or rideshare service to bridge the gap, so getting the car back requires someone else with a car to drive the owner there.