ST. LOUIS -- A dozen St. Louis County municipalities are suing over a new law designed to curb their over-reliance on petty traffic tickets for revenue.
A group of mayors on Thursday announced their lawsuit against Missouri Gov. Jeremiah Nixon (D) and various state officials. The leaders, who represent municipalities that on average are each smaller than a square mile, are targeting a bipartisan bill enacted in August that lowers the money their towns can make from court fines and traffic tickets from 30 percent to 12.5 percent of their total revenue.
Following the police killing of Michael Brown last year, the St. Louis region erupted in chaos, with residents protesting the broken relationship between police and civilians. For years, police departments throughout the country bullied residents with tickets and arrests in order to generate revenue for municipalities.
State Sen. Eric Schmitt (R), who sponsored the legislation, said in a press conference Thursday that the "meritless lawsuit" was fighting against the "most significant municipal reform in the history of our state."
The current system "has created debtors' prisons and contributed to the cycle of poverty for way too many folks in the St. Louis area," he said.
Standing alongside Schmitt in support of the new law was state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed (D).
"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 uprise you saw."
According to a report by the research group Better Together, 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 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," he 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 the heavy ticketing of 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 liberal groups like the Institute for Justice and Better Together "to get rid of some of the small municipalities."
"We have never tried to take any revenue as far as housing or traffic -- we have no traffic cameras. I don't believe in traffic cameras. I don't believe in ticket quotas. I believe that every ticket you write should be a valid ticket on its own," Carter said.
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.