Post-Dispatch Says Same Thing That I Did … Pretty Neat, Huh?

State and Local Government |
By David Stokes | Read Time 1 minute

In this morning’s editorial (that would be Thursday), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called for legislation that would lower the percent of any city’s budget that can be funded by traffic tickets:

The Missouri legislature could end this with a simple piece of legislation. Right now, municipalities are allowed to collect up to 45 percent of their revenue from certain types of traffic tickets. Missouri should drop that limit, perhaps to as little as 10 percent, and apply it to all tickets. That would greatly reduce cities’ incentive to abuse police power for the sake of local budgets.

I agree completely with them, as I stated here. I would wonder if they got their ideas from me, but since I got all the information for my posts on this issue from their articles, I’ll call it even.

About the Author

David Stokes is a St. Louis native and a graduate of Saint Louis University High School and Fairfield (Conn.) University. He spent six years as a political aide at the St. Louis County Council before joining the Show-Me Institute in 2007. Stokes was a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute from 2007 to 2016. From 2016 through 2020 he was Executive Director of Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, where he led efforts to oppose harmful floodplain developments done with abusive tax subsidies. Stokes rejoined the Institute in early 2021 as the Director of Municipal Policy. He is a past president of the University City Library Board. He served on the St. Louis County 2010 Council Redistricting Commission and was the 2012 representative to the Electoral College from Missouri’s First Congressional District. He lives in University City with his wife and their three children.

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