Tallahassee, Florida – Recently, Florida senator, Joe Grueters has brought forward a proposed legislation that would require collision repair facilities to request written crash reports before working on damaged vehicles.
If passed, the bill would add extra work to collision repair facilities’ process by requiring them to submit, on a daily basis, documentation of each damaged vehicle they worked on the previous day.
The proposed law, Bill 194, is also referred to as the Lilly Glaubach Act–named for a 13-year-old girl who was killed during a hit-and-run while riding her bicycle in August, 2022.
Following Lilly Glaubach’s death, it later emerged that the driver convicted of killing her, David Chang, took his car to a repair facility immediately after the incident, telling employees that the vehicle had been damaged by a falling tree.
The Lilly Glaubach Act would make it a second-degree misdemeanour for facilities to perform collision work on a vehicle without first obtaining a crash report or completing a transaction form.
The transaction form would have to include: the name and address of the repair facility; the vehicle identification number, year, license tag number, make, model and colour of the damaged vehicle; the name, phone number, physical description and address of the vehicle’s owner or the person who brought it in; and a description of the damage.
Repair centres would be required to keep a copy of each transaction for at least a year following the date of the transaction. They would also be required to, by the end of the business day, deliver the original transaction forms from the previous day to local police stations. An online option would also be available.
