A dozen St. Louis County municipalities filed suit to block a new law designed to curb their over-reliance on petty traffic tickets for generating revenue.
On November 19 a group of North County mayors announced their lawsuit against Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and other state officials for signing and entering into state law Senate Bill 5. The law, enacted in August, lowered the money their towns can make from court fines and traffic tickets from 30 percent to 12.5 percent of their total revenue. If a municipality collects more revenue from traffic tickets than allowed by law, it must give that excess amount to local schools.
The cities filing the lawsuit are Normandy, Cool Valley, Velda Village Hills, Glen Echo Park, Bel Ridge, Bel-Nor, Pagedale, Moline Acres, Uplands Park, Vinita Park, Northwoods and Wellston. On average, these municipalities are each smaller than a square mile in size.
The lawsuit against Senate Bill 5 was filed in Cole County Court, where state offices are located, by David Pittinsky, a senior litigation partner at Ballard Spahr, headquartered in Philadelphia. The suit calls foul on a provision in the law barring St. Louis County cities from incorporating more than 12.5 percent of traffic-fine revenue into their budgets, when cities in the rest of the state have a 20 percent ceiling. That makes it an unconstitutional “special law,” according to the suit. The suit alleged this discrepancy is “an extraordinary act of overt discrimination.”
“Had the General Assembly passed a bill that applied to all 114 counties and had them all at 20 percent and had provided all the funding for all the new responsibilities, I probably wouldn’t be here,” Pittinsky said.
State Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Glendale), who steered passage of SB5, told St. Louis Public Radio that in fact many laws are directed at specific cities or counties.
The suit also alleged that municipal standards the new law imposed upon St. Louis County’s cities amount to an unfunded mandate, which is barred by Missouri’s “Hancock Amendment.” North County mayors and Chris Krehmeyer of Beyond Housing have pointed out that some of the cities that filed the suit first suggested the idea of standards for St. Louis County municipalities – but the new law provides no funding to implement the new standards.
“No matter how commendable the standards may be, they have no right to impose them without the funding,” Pittinsky said.
Schmitt said in a press conference that the “meritless lawsuit” was trying to undo the “most significant municipal reform in the history of our state.”
The current system, Schmitt said, “has created debtors’ prisons and contributed to the cycle of poverty for way too many folks in the St. Louis area.” These conditions were uncovered by the Ferguson protest movement and eventually the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, though legal advocates ArchCity Defenders were already calling attention to the situation in St. Louis County municipal courts before the unrest was sparked.
Standing alongside Schmitt in support of the new law was state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis). “The problems you saw in Ferguson, it was beyond the killing of Michael Brown,” Nasheed said. “Those individuals in those municipalities felt they were economically oppressed for far too long, and that’s the uprising you saw.”
According to a report by the research group Better Together St. Louis, some municipalities in the area were generating over 30 percent of their revenue from court fines and tickets. Schmitt said that three-fifths of the arrest warrants in St. Louis County (300,000) are from minor traffic violations.
The Rev. B. T. Rice, who attended Schmitt’s press conference, said the court system in St. Louis County was “horrible.”
“We’ve seen our people standing in the heat of the day, 100 degree heat, trying to go to pay a traffic ticket because of a tail light, and they were unable to take their children in,” Rice said.
Rice said those people would then receive a warrant for leaving court. “Then, if found while driving, they would be arrested. They would lose their job,” he said.
In an email to The St. Louis American, Monica Huddleston, the former mayor of Greendale, said none of the mayors are in favor of “victimizing anyone at the hands of local police or courts.” Greendale is one of the municipalities taking part in the lawsuit.
“You and others are still talking about abuses that have been all but eradicated months ago, and such was occurring in very few of our muni courts,” Huddleston wrote.
The city of Pagedale, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is currently facing its own federal lawsuit for heavily ticketing house ordinance violations. The Institute For Justice, a law firm with connections to the industrialist billionaire Koch brothers, is heading the lawsuit against Pagedale. Since 2010, the town increased non-traffic violations by nearly 500 percent.
The city told The Huffington Post that in 2010, it made less than $1,000 for house ordinance violations, which cover things like broken screen doors and messy lawns. In 2014, that figure was nearly $9,000.
Pagedale Mayor Mary Carter told HuffPost that the lawsuit against her city is “unfair” and part of an overall effort from groups like the Institute for Justice and Better Together “to get rid of some of the small municipalities.”
Former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch said that if some municipalities can’t sustain themselves without excess traffic revenue, “So what?” Fitch said the mayors who filed the lawsuit “are not just guilty,” they’re also “the main suspects” in abusing the system. “They’re the ones telling their officers to go out and write tickets,” he said.
Schmitt struck a moral tone.
“The level of abuse that was taking place in my home county was astounding,” Schmitt told St. Louis Public Radio. “The level of profiteering that’s taking place by a lot of these municipalities is astounding. And so, as a matter of public policy, the General Assembly in large majorities came together in a bipartisan way and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ And to me, this isn’t a lawsuit against Senate Bill 5 or the division of percentages. It’s a lawsuit against the people, especially the poor and the disadvantaged.”
Normandy Mayor Patrick Green accused Schmitt of hypocrisy, race-baiting and grandstanding with SB 5 as he prepared for a statewide campaign for treasurer.
“Schmitt makes it sounds like all of these majority-black municipal governments don’t care about poor black people,” Green told The St. Louis American. “Tell me, looking at his voting record, when did Eric Schmitt start caring about poor black people? This is all about his political agenda. And we find it offensive for him to imply that all of these black government officials are running their governments by preying on low-income black people.”
In 2013, Normandy saw 40 percent of its revenue come from traffic ticket fines and fees.
For Schmitt, this is not about him or his political ambitions. “It’s stunning how the bureaucrats joining this effort have turned on the very people they were elected to represent,” Schmitt said. “I am stunned by the tone-deafness. But again, given that they’ve been fighting this along the way with taxpayer money, sadly I’m not surprised they’re taking this action.”
When asked whether citizens within the cities filing the lawsuit would benefit from the new law, Pittinsky replied: “What you have to ask yourself is what is proper as a matter of governance in the state of Missouri? Is it proper to pass a statute which violates the Constitution because you think you have the knowledge – the sole knowledge – on how to prevent certain problems from occurring? Now, [state government] hasn’t asked how these mayors are to cope with any of the problems they have. All they’ve done is say ‘We’re going to take away your money and we’re going to give you more responsibilities.’ That’s not permitted by the Constitution.”
In a statement, Attorney General Chris Koster – who is also named in the suit – said that the new law “passed overwhelmingly with strong bipartisan support.” He added that it “seeks to stop municipalities from abusing citizens through excessive ticketing practices.”
“My office will vigorously defend the bill against this legal challenge,” Koster said.
This column relied on reporting by our content partner Mariah Stewart, Ferguson Fellow for The Huffington Post, and Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio.
