Bill tackles traffic tickets
Published Feb. 6, 2007
The town of Mosby, Mo., has 246 people, two miles of highway and a dependence on traffic ticket revenue.
The city collects roughly $8,000 per year from property tax and $110,000 per year from traffic tickets, said Rep. Bob Nance, R-Excelsior Springs.
The law in Missouri states that no more than 45 percent of a city's annual general operating revenue can come from traffic tickets. Nance has proposed legislation to lower the revenue cap from 45 to 35 percent. The proposed language of the bill also states that municipalities need to turn over any money collected in excess of this cap to the director of the department of revenue or "submit to an annual audit by the state auditor."
Nance said the practice of towns using traffic tickets to raise money is unfair to non-resident drivers.
"If a town needs more money, they need to raise taxes," Nance said. "They don't need to penalize the state's drivers."
While driving through Mosby — which is near Kansas City — in early April last year, Nance said he saw a drug and gun checkpoint set up by the city's police. He talked to one motorist to whom the police issued a citation for having a license plate light out and then searched his car.
Nance said he was furious and asked for the city's paperwork on the reason for the checkpoint, which is required by law, but said the city had no paperwork to show. The police chief resigned in May.
"I saw so many cases of this kind of thing that I just felt I had to do something," Nance said.
Nance proposed similar legislation last year, but it died in committee. Because so many small municipalities are dependent on this kind of revenue, an amendment was added to last year's bill to give cities until 2010 to fill the hole the revenue cap would create in their budgets. Nance said he would be willing to support the same kind of amendment for this bill if it means it will pass.
Mosby's police officers have been sued numerous times for inappropriate searches conducted on pulled-over motorists, Nance said. Nance estimated that 95 percent of the motorists who are issued tickets by Mosby's 10 part-time police officers are non-residents driving through the town.
"Most of the time, we're talking about a small city with a low population without as many professionally trained police officers as a bigger city," Nance said. "Some of them use their authority beyond its need."
Columbia police chief Randy Boehm is a member of the Missouri Police Chiefs' Association, an organization that is opposed to any legislation that restricts what a city's law enforcement can do. Boehm said the new law would be cumbersome to the city and police department because of the difficulty involved in tracking revenue from traffic tickets.
Traffic Unit Supervisor Sgt. Tim Moriarity said the Columbia Police Department issued 10,122 tickets in 2006 with an average of 10,000 tickets per year since 1999. The city makes roughly $300,000-$350,000 per year from traffic violations and had a total operating budget of $316,938,476 in 2006.
Because Columbia only receives around one percent of its total operating budget from traffic tickets, Boehm does not think that the bill will affect the city if it passes.
Although Nance does not know how much support his bill will receive in the Missouri General Assembly, he said he thinks the bill has gotten lawmakers' attention.
"Even if it doesn't pass, the city of Mosby is a lot better to drive through now than it was a year ago," he said.
