ATLANTA — A bill to regulate booters that patrol Georgia parking lots overwhelmingly passed the state Senate.
The bill does not ban booting, but it would place major new restrictions on how booters operate.
“Right now, booting companies can just run wild. Nobody has to call them. They patrol on their own and they make their own judge, jury, executioner decisions,” the bill’s author state Sen. Josh McLaurin said.
The bill would outlaw the practice of booters monitoring or patrolling lots. Landlords would have to call a booter like with a tow truck. It would also ban kickback payments from booters to landlords.
Both of those are restrictions that already apply to tow companies.
The booting measure was added as an amendment to the unrelated House Bill 551 on the Senate floor and passed by a vote of 48-3.
“Right now, booting companies are paying up to half their boot, half their fee to property owners as kickbacks. And that has caused a lot of predatory activity,” McLaurin said.
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Over the past 2 years, he has introduced legislation to rein in booting.
In 2023, McLaurin filed a bill that would ban booting entirely. In 2024, he introduced a bill similar to this amendment.
In a 2024 Senate hearing, landlords and booting operators warned that those booters patrolling lots are the only reasonable way to protect against illegal parkers.
“If we have to go down the other path, we are just going to tow, and that’s going to be a lot worse to the consumer than a boot,” said Jack Hanning from InterPark in 2024.
McLaurin said the proposed law would stop the worst abuses of booters.
“All the horror stories you hear about, you walk into the store for four minutes, and there’s a boot on your car that will come to an end,” he said.
Since this was added as an amendment to a bill that already passed the House, it will not need to go through the committee process and only needs a motion to agree by the House sponsor and a vote on the House floor.
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