Pueblo County Vehicle Impound Guide

A sober passenger sitting in the car at the time of a DUI stop can sometimes change everything — officers in Pueblo have discretion to release the vehicle to them on the spot rather than towing it, avoiding the entire impound process. But that discretion disappears the moment the car is blocking traffic or gets flagged as evidentiary, and once it's actually hooked up and moving, the full law-enforcement tow fee structure applies regardless — none of the "drop fee" protections that cover residential and private-property tows carry over to a DUI seizure.

The base cost runs around $279.78 an hour, billed port-to-port with a one-hour minimum, so even a 15-minute drive to the lot gets billed as a full hour. Storage adds $47.12 a day on top, and an after-hours release fee of roughly $103.70 applies to anyone trying to retrieve a vehicle before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on a weekend — which describes most DUI arrests. The math isn't always obvious: paying that fee immediately versus waiting until Monday and absorbing two more days of storage can land close to a wash, so it's worth doing the actual arithmetic rather than assuming either option is automatically cheaper. Mileage adds roughly $3.80 a mile on top of all that, and a vehicle sitting more than three to five days triggers a certified notification letter to the owner and lienholder, with its own $75 to $150 fee attached.

For Pueblo Police Department tows specifically, the department inserts itself as a gatekeeper the whole way through. Calling the Impound Vehicle Department at 719-553-2563 is the mandatory first step — don't go to the tow yard first. If the vehicle's under an evidentiary hold (common in felony DUIs, accidents involving injury, or vehicular assault cases), nothing moves until the PPD or the District Attorney's office formally lifts it, a process that can genuinely take days or weeks, and storage fees often keep accruing during that entire hold even though the owner had no way to speed it up — some judges will later order those fees waived if the hold was clearly excessive, but that's a fight for later, not something resolved at the tow yard.

The actual release sequence is a genuine back-and-forth: pay the tow yard first, get a receipt, take that receipt to the police department to get the official release, then return to the tow yard a second time to actually collect the vehicle. Documentation has to be ready at each stop — a valid license or a temporary permit plus a second licensed driver if the license was confiscated; title or registration, which if it's locked in the glove box requires a preliminary visit just to retrieve that one document before anything else can happen; and current insurance, where a printed copy is safer than relying on a phone that might die mid-errand.

One particularly rough scenario: if the DUI involved an accident that left the car undrivable, Pueblo's impound lots prohibit any mechanical work on-site at all, even swapping a tire, citing civil liability concerns. That means hiring a second tow truck just to move the vehicle from the impound lot to an actual repair shop or home — a "tow-from-tow" that doubles the logistics and the cost in one move. A vehicle left unclaimed for 30 days enters the formal abandoned-vehicle process and eventually gets sold at public auction; if that sale doesn't cover what's owed, the original owner can still be pursued for the remaining balance even after losing the car entirely. In particularly serious cases, Pueblo can also declare a vehicle a "nuisance" tied to a crime, triggering a restraining order against the vehicle itself that blocks release until a full abatement period passes and every fee is paid.