Bent County Vehicle Impound Guide

A DUI tow in Bent County can hit $300 to $400 before a single day of storage even accrues, and the reason has nothing to do with the car itself. Las Animas has no local towing operators at all, so the rotation list dispatching officers call from runs through Lamar, Springfield, or Pueblo instead, and the owner ends up liable for mileage both ways: the truck's empty drive out to the scene and the loaded drive back to whichever town's yard it's heading to.

Hook Towing, based in Lamar about 40 minutes east and rated highly by the BBB, handles the bulk of this rotation. Jeff Woller Auto Parts & Towing out of Springfield, roughly an hour south, and Zim's Towing in Pueblo, about 90 minutes west for heavy-duty jobs or when the closer options are tied up, round out the list. Whichever one gets dispatched determines where the car physically ends up, and that's rarely anywhere close to Las Animas itself.

Getting the car back runs through two separate steps that trap a lot of people in wasted trips. First, the law enforcement hold has to be lifted in person at the Bent County Sheriff's Office on Road FF.75, which requires a valid photo ID, proof of ownership, and current insurance, the single most common failure point, since lapsed coverage means the Sheriff can't authorize the car to be driven on public roads at all, forcing a second tow just to move it somewhere private and doubling the cost. If the owner's own license was confiscated at arrest, a licensed driver has to come along to act as the one physically removing the vehicle. Second, once that release paperwork exists, the actual trip to the tow yard still has to happen, and if the car's sitting in Lamar, that's 35 miles from Las Animas with no car to make the drive. Friends, family, or Bent County Transit's limited weekday bus schedule are the realistic options; the bus doesn't run at all on weekends, which strands anyone released on a Saturday until Monday regardless of how ready they are to retrieve their vehicle.

One call before any of that saves a genuinely wasted trip: contact the Sheriff's administrative line and ask directly whether the release order has actually been faxed to the tow company yet. Tow drivers are legally barred from releasing a vehicle without that document in hand and won't take anyone's word for it, so driving 35 to 90 miles only to be turned away is avoidable with a two-minute phone call first.

Rural tow yards here tend to run cash-only, or their card readers simply don't work reliably given the cell coverage in these remote lots, so showing up with cash in hand is the safer plan. Storage runs $30 to $50 a day, and a Friday arrest that collides with the Sheriff's office being closed until Monday guarantees roughly $150 in storage before release paperwork can even be processed. Whatever the total bill ends up being, Colorado law still requires specific items, prescription medication, medical equipment, car seats, ID, and cash or cards needed to pay the tow itself, to be released free regardless of whether the full bill has been settled; a tow operator demanding a gate fee for access to those specific items is asking for something the law doesn't actually allow.