La Plata County Vehicle Impound Guide

Across 1,800 square miles with no single central lot, Bo Dean's Towing handles most DUI impounds out of Durango, while Performance Automotive Repair out near Bayfield and Animas Towing and Recovery up toward Silverton cover the county's more remote edges. Which one actually has a specific vehicle depends entirely on which agency made the stop — the Durango Police Department, the Sheriff's Office, or Colorado State Patrol — so calling that agency directly is the only reliable way to trace it, rather than guessing based on where the arrest happened.

The fee structure is rigid and, by law, can't be negotiated. A law-enforcement tow runs a base $102.28 an hour, storage adds $48.19 a day, and a $150 statutory notification fee applies if the vehicle requires formal mail notice to the owner. Tow companies are explicitly not permitted to offer payment plans on these tows — the full balance is due before release, no exceptions.

Personal items left inside the car create a genuine point of friction worth knowing in advance. Operators can legally charge up to $100 an hour just to let an owner back into the vehicle to grab non-essential belongings like tools or a laptop. But state law carves out a specific, mandatory exception: prescription medications, medical equipment, child car seats, government ID, cell phones, and any cash or cards earmarked specifically for paying the tow bill all have to be released free of charge, no access fee attached. If a lot attendant tries to charge for retrieving any of those specific items, that's worth pushing back on directly rather than simply paying.

Release itself requires a valid driver's license, current insurance, and proof of ownership — and since a DUI arrest typically means the license was just confiscated under Colorado's Express Consent law, the practical result is that a second, fully licensed driver has to physically come along to drive the vehicle off the lot. For anything involving vehicular assault, a fatality, or extended evidence processing, the tow yard is legally barred from releasing the car at all until written clearance comes from the investigating detective — no amount of persistence at the counter changes that.

There's a narrow "drop charge" rule that sounds useful but almost never applies in a DUI context specifically: if the owner reaches the vehicle after it's hooked up but before it's physically moved, a lesser fee can sometimes apply instead of the full tow. In practice, since the driver in a DUI stop is typically being placed in handcuffs at that exact moment, the only realistic version of this is a sober passenger present at the scene, holding a valid license, whom the officer agrees to let take the car before the tow truck actually pulls away.

Winter introduces its own complication specific to this mountainous terrain. A vehicle that slides off an icy road or ends up stuck in a snowbank converts what would've been a routine DUI stop into a full accident investigation requiring heavy-duty recovery equipment — immediately and substantially raising the cost before the standard impound fees even start accruing.