The Patriot Post® · Revenue Stream Is No Excuse for Citation Abuse

For many municipalities, tickets and fines make up an alarming percentage of revenue — up to 90% in some instances. That’s the startling finding by C. Jarrett Dieterle, who examines the issue of “Citation Nation” in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. “Washington, D.C. collects more than $200 per-capita in annual law-enforcement-related fees and has floated proposals to increase certain traffic penalties to $1,000,” Dieterle unnervingly notes. Moreover, nine in 10 mayors are exploring alternative revenue streams. You can imagine how ticket revenue must tempt mayors like candy does a child. As Dieterle writes, “The attractiveness of tickets and fines as revenue generators is underscored by the fact that most people who receive tickets simply pay the fine and move on.” Here’s how the appeal plays out policy-wise:

> In 2006, Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell worked a 33 percent increase in traffic-ticket revenue into the city’s proposed budget: the revenue boost was intended to help the city spend an extra $60 million on various projects and initiatives. Similarly, a 2011 bill introduced in the South Carolina Legislature attracted widespread attention for proposing to direct money from certain traffic tickets into the state’s general fund. Traffic tickets issued by police officers are not the only type of fine that can be used for revenue generation. Red-light and speeding cameras long have been criticized for their revenue-generating functions, and some municipalities have turned to ordinance violations to gin up more revenue. Fees for particular government services and operations have gained popularity as well. Many court systems have raised court fees for hearings, and some municipalities have even introduced trash and ambulance fees. The city of Winter Haven, Florida, for example, introduced an accident-response fee, leading to shock among residents when they began receiving $300 bills in the mail weeks after an ambulance was called. And in Northwoods, Missouri, residents were told that they either had to begin paying a $20 trash pickup fee or risk the possibility of layoffs in the city police department.

Suffice it to say, this is alarming and very legally questionable. Infusing ticket revenue into a city budget means law enforcement is compelled to focus more on quotas than well-being, as demonstrated in these statistics: “In St. Ann, a suburb of St. Louis, the issuance of speeding tickets increased almost threefold in the span of five years — all at a time when the local population was falling. Similarly, New Miami Village, Ohio, with a population of just over 2,000, issued 45,000 tickets in a 15-month span before a judge intervened and ordered a portion of the citation revenue returned to local citizens.” And the problem is growing nationwide, particularly among financially stressed municipalities looking to reverse the balance sheet’s red ink. But unlike property taxes — another constitutionally dubious tax, but we digress — the revenue from tickets isn’t stable. The other problem is that local leaders are free to spend that money as they see fit. Now would be a good time for Republican governors — who control the majority of the states — to show leadership by clamping down on this abuse of power.