Ryan O’donnell v. CITY OF CHICAGO and URT UNITED ROAD TOWING, INC .

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 24-2946
R YAN O’DONNELL and M ICHAEL GOREE,
individually and on behalf of all others
similarly situated,
Plaintiffs-Appellants,
v.
C ITY OF C HICAGO and URT U NITED
R OAD TOWING, I NC .,
Defendants-Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 1:23-cv-01192 — Andrea R. Wood, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED S EPTEMBER 3, 2025 — DECIDED D ECEMBER 22, 2025
____________________
Before S CUDDER , K IRSCH , and PRYOR , Circuit Judges.
K IRSCH , Circuit Judge. The City of Chicago may immobi-
lize, tow, impound, and ultimately dispose of vehicles to en-
force compliance with its traffic code. The City disposed of
Ryan O’Donnell’s and Michael Goree’s vehicles pursuant to
this graduated forfeiture scheme, without compensating

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2 No. 24-2946
them. O’Donnell and Goree then filed a putative class action
against the City and URT United Road Towing, Inc., a towing
company that works for the City. They alleged that the City’s
forfeiture scheme is facially unconstitutional under the Fifth
Amendment’s Takings Clause and the Illinois constitution
and brought a state-law unjust enrichment claim. The district
court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss for failure
to state a claim. Because that court correctly determined that
vehicle forfeiture pursuant to the City’s traffic code is not a
taking, we affirm.
I
After receiving a ticket in Chicago, a vehicle owner must
pay in full, enter into an installment payment plan, or contest
the violation. Municipal Code of Chicago (MCC) § 9-100-050.
If the owner fails to pay or successfully contest the violation,
the City of Chicago sends a notice of final determination of
liability. Id. § 9-100-100. If a vehicle owner accumulates three
or more final determinations of liability, or two final determi-
nations that are over a year old, all vehicles registered to that
owner become eligible for immobilization. Id. § 9-100-120(b).
The City sends a notice of impending vehicle immobilization
and the owner has 21 days from the date of notice to pay the
amount due or request a hearing. Id. If no action is taken, the
City places all vehicles registered to the owner on an immobi-
lization list. Id.
After a vehicle is immobilized, the owner has 24 hours to
pay the amount due, enter into an installment payment plan,
participate in a relief program, or request additional time to
comply. Id. § 9-100-120(c)–(d). Otherwise, the City may tow
and impound the vehicle. Id. URT United Road Towing, Inc.
(URT) is a private contractor that tows such vehicles for the

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No. 24-2946 3
City. Once a car is impounded, the City sends an additional
notice and the owner has 21 days from that date to pay the
fees and claim the vehicle or request an extension. Id. § 9-100-
120(f). The owner may also request an administrative hearing
to determine whether the immobilization or towing was erro-
neous. Id. § 9-100-120(e). If, however, the vehicle remains un-
claimed, the City may sell or dispose of it. Id. § 9-100-120(f).
Some of these unclaimed vehicles are sold to URT at scrap
value.
In 2018 and 2021, respectively, the City disposed of vehi-
cles owned by Michael Goree and Ryan O’Donnell according
to the graduated forfeiture scheme set forth in § 9-100-120. It
sold O’Donnell’s vehicle to URT at scrap value and relin-
quished Goree’s to the lienholder. The City did not compen-
sate O’Donnell or Goree after it disposed of their cars, nor did
it use any of the proceeds to offset their unpaid ticket debt.
O’Donnell and Goree filed a putative class action against
the City and URT, alleging a facial violation of the Fifth
Amendment’s Takings Clause, a Monell claim against URT,
and state-law claims. The City and URT moved to dismiss the
complaint for failure to state a claim. The district court
granted the defendants’ motions and dismissed all claims,
finding that the City’s graduated forfeiture scheme was not a
taking.
II
We review de novo a district court’s dismissal for failure
to state a claim, accepting all well-pleaded factual allegations
as true and drawing all reasonable inferences in the plaintiffs’
favor. We first address the plaintiffs’ takings claims. Because
those fail, their remaining claims do as well.

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4 No. 24-2946
The same standard applies to the plaintiffs’ takings claims
under the federal and Illinois constitutions, so we analyze
those claims together. See Hampton v. Metro. Water Reclamation
Dist., 57 N.E.3d 1229, 1235–36 (Ill. 2016). The Takings Clause
of the Fifth Amendment, made applicable to the states
through the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that private
property shall not be taken “for public use, without just com-
pensation.” Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528, 536
(2005) (citation modified). To establish a violation of the Tak-
ings Clause, plaintiffs must show that: (i) the government
took their property, either through a physical taking, or
through unduly onerous regulations; (ii) the taking was for a
public use; and (iii) no matter what type of property (real or
personal) was taken, the government has not paid just com-
pensation. Conyers v. City of Chicago, 10 F.4th 704, 710–11 (7th
Cir. 2021) (citation modified).
Because O’Donnell and Goree challenge § 9-100-120 as fa-
cially unconstitutional, they must show that the “mere enact-
ment” of § 9-100-120 constitutes a taking. Keystone Bituminous
Coal Ass’n v. DeBenedictis, 480 U.S. 470, 494 (1987). They can-
not.
In Hadley v. City of South Bend, 154 F.4th 549, 554 (7th Cir.
2025), we considered a takings claim that—like this one—
arose from a state’s exercise of its police power rather than
eminent domain. Eminent domain traditionally refers to “a
state’s power to physically take property by formally con-
demning it.” Id. The police power, conversely, refers to “a
state’s general authority to determine, primarily, what
measures are appropriate or needful for the protection of the
public morals, the public health, or the public safety.” Id. (ci-
tation modified). As we acknowledged in Hadley, the takings

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No. 24-2946 5
analysis doesn’t draw “rigid distinctions between eminent
domain and police power actions,” and every police power
action may not bar a takings claim. Id. at 554–56 (citation mod-
ified). Nonetheless, we regarded the exercise of law enforce-
ment authority as a “classic example” of police power that
does foreclose takings claims. Id. at 556.
Applying that principle here, immobilizing, towing, im-
pounding, and—if necessary—disposing of vehicles under
§ 9-100-120 is an exercise of the City’s police power to enforce
its traffic code, and thus isn’t a taking. The purpose of the for-
feiture scheme is to target individuals who—by refusing to
pay—have hitherto evaded punishment for their traffic and
parking infractions. Instead of continuing to issue unan-
swered tickets, the City institutes a different form of punish-
ment: hindering offenders’ ability to drive by immobilizing,
impounding, and potentially even disposing of their vehicles.
Without this graduated forfeiture scheme, vehicle owners
who repeatedly violate the traffic code could evade punish-
ment. The threat of impoundment and disposal forces them
to internalize the consequences of their behavior and, accord-
ingly, deters those violations in the first place. See Tate v. Dis-
trict of Columbia, 627 F.3d 904, 909 (D.C. Cir. 2010). Because
§ 9-100-120’s function is to enforce the City’s traffic code, it’s
the kind of law enforcement forfeiture scheme “firmly fixed
in the punitive and remedial jurisprudence of the country”
and does not constitute a taking. See id. (quoting Bennis v.
Michigan, 516 U.S. 442, 453 (1996)) (finding that a scheme sim-
ilar to the one here didn’t constitute a taking).
The plaintiffs’ arguments to the contrary aren’t persua-
sive. Their primary contention is that § 9-100-120 is a debt-col-
lection mechanism that punishes the inability to pay and is

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6 No. 24-2946
not a law enforcement measure. The plaintiffs rely, in part, on
In re Fulton, 926 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 2019), vacated and re-
manded on other grounds sub nom., City of Chicago v. Fulton,
592 U.S. 154 (2021), where we described § 9-100-120 as “an ex-
ercise of revenue collection more so than police power.” Id. at
929–30. But Fulton was a bankruptcy case, not a takings case,
and did not conclude that § 9-100-120 is—as the plaintiffs con-
tend—exclusively a debt-collection mechanism. Indeed, it’s a
feature, not a bug, that § 9-100-120 both “raises money and
improves compliance with traffic laws.” Idris v. City of Chi-
cago, 552 F.3d 564, 566 (7th Cir. 2009). And while some forfei-
tures may result from an inability to pay, that’s not neces-
sarily true in every case. One could, for example, imagine an
owner who is able to pay but decides not to. Because O’Don-
nell and Goree must show that the “mere enactment” of § 9-
100-120 is a taking, situation-specific arguments don’t ad-
vance their facial challenge. Keystone Bituminous Coal Ass’n,
480 U.S. at 494. Their arguments that the underlying offenses
may be minimal, or that the vehicle owner may not be the of-
fending driver, fail for the same reason.
The plaintiffs also argue that § 9-100-120 is distinguishable
from the forfeiture scheme permitted in Bennis, because the
forfeited vehicle there was used in criminal activity and
couldn’t be reclaimed. See 516 U.S. at 453. Here, conversely,
the City can seize cars not involved in any underlying viola-
tion, and owners need only pay to get their cars back. Though
present, these dissimilarities don’t render § 9-100-120 any less
constitutional. First, allowing owners to recover their cars af-
ter paying is consistent with § 9-100-120’s punitive purpose.
Once owners pay their ticket debt, they’ve internalized the
cost of their infractions and there’s no need for the City to con-
tinue to hold their vehicles. Second, the sweeping nature of

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No. 24-2946 7
§ 9-100-120’s reach also serves a punitive purpose: if the City
doesn’t place every vehicle registered to an owner on the im-
mobilization list, those with multiple vehicles can continue to
drive, thwarting § 9-100-120’s intended effect.
Finally, the plaintiffs err in relying on Tyler v. Hennepin
County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023), to argue that the City commits a
taking by retaining all vehicle sales proceeds without apply-
ing any of it to unpaid ticket debt. The principle at work in
Tyler—that the government “may not take more from a tax-
payer than she owes”—doesn’t apply here, where the govern-
ment enforces laws pursuant to its police power. Id. at 639; see
also Aldens, Inc. v. LaFollette, 552 F.2d 745, 749 (7th Cir. 1977)
(noting that the police and tax powers are distinct and subject
to different limitations). In sum, § 9-100-120 is an exercise of
the City’s police power to enforce its traffic code, so the Tak-
ings Clause doesn’t apply and the plaintiffs cannot establish
a federal or state takings violation.
Because § 9-100-120’s graduated forfeiture scheme doesn’t
constitute a taking, the plaintiffs’ remaining claims also fail.
For the purpose of this appeal, we can assume (without de-
ciding) that URT is a state actor, because there is no underly-
ing constitutional violation to support the plaintiffs’ Monell
claim against URT. See Sallenger v. City of Springfield, 630 F.3d
499, 505 (7th Cir. 2010). Nor do they have a viable unjust en-
richment claim, which requires a showing that the defendant
“has unjustly retained a benefit to the plaintiff’s detriment,
and that the defendant’s retention of the benefit violates the
fundamental principles of justice, equity, and good con-
science.” K-Stones, Inc. v. Ko, 267 N.E.3d 363, 374–75 (Ill. App.
Ct. 2025) (citation modified). Because the City lawfully

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impounded and disposed of the plaintiffs’ vehicles, there was
no unjust benefit to it or to URT.
A FFIRMED

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