This November, Vote No on Amendment 6

With the November election less than one month away, it seems likely that you’re being inundated with news and opinions related to upcoming federal, state, and local elections. In Missouri, voters will have the opportunity to weigh in on five amendments to Missouri’s constitution. You have likely seen three of these amendments—Amendment 2 (legalizing sports betting), Amendment 3 (restoring abortion access), and Amendment 4 (allowing a new casino in the Lake of the Ozarks)—covered by local media over the last year, as all of these were added to the ballot through Missouri’s initiative petition process. However, Amendment 6 was added to the ballot via a bill passed by our legislature, and it has barely received any attention from the media. 

On the surface, the language that you will see on the ballot next month will seem fairly innocuous: Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to provide that the administration of justice shall include the levying of costs and fees to support salaries and benefits for certain current and former law enforcement personnel? State and local governmental entities estimate an unknown fiscal impact.

One might reasonably guess that the majority of Missouri voters consider themselves “pro-law enforcement,” and so it seems likely that the amendment will pass, since there is no organized opposition to the measure. But, in fact, several local and national criminal justice advocacy groups strongly opposed this bill during session for one clear reason: Pensions should not rely on variable fee revenue streams tied to the volume of activity in the criminal justice system.

To better understand this issue, we have to review the events that led to the bill’s passage in the legislature. In recent years, there was a class action lawsuit in Kansas City filed against the Missouri Sheriffs’ Retirement System (MSRS) by a group of individuals who had paid a $3 surcharge on traffic tickets. The fee was used to fund sheriffs’ pensions; it was put in place by state law in 1983. In 2021, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the fee could no longer be levied, because the surcharge was not “reasonably related to the expense of the administration of justice.” The Missouri Constitution only allows for the levying of this type of surcharge when it is “reasonably related to the expense of the administration of justice;” therefore, the charge was found to be unconstitutional.

However, rather than find a different mechanism to fund the pensions of sheriffs and prosecutors, the Missouri legislature is electing to attempt to amend Missouri’s Constitution to include the funding of pensions in the definition of “the administration of justice.”  Here’s why Empower Missouri opposes this amendment: 

• Pension funds for public servants deserve adequate, reliable funding. Yet, fees are extremely difficult to collect, making them an unreliable and improper source of law enforcement funding. Because the majority of people in the system are low-income, these fees are primarily levied on people who lack the financial resources to pay them. Research has shown that states spend a huge amount of money trying to collect fees, and still collection rates are often very low. In some cases, states spend more on collections than the amount collected, meaning they lose money trying to pursue this revenue source. This is why it is rare for states to use fees and other targeted revenue streams to cover pension contributions, because those revenues inherently fluctuate. Instead, contributions should be paid from general revenues and be recalculated annually to ensure systems remain solvent.

• Funding law enforcement through fees hurts public safety, forcing them to dedicate limited resources to chase uncollectable debts. Collection and enforcement efforts divert law enforcement and courts from their core responsibilities of keeping people safe. Rather than focusing on serious crime, law enforcement officials are turned into tax collectors, destroying the community relationships that are critical for police to solve crimes and keep communities safe. One study found that every 1% increase in revenue from fines, fees and forfeitures correlated with a more than 6 percent decrease in the violent crime clearance rate and 8 percentage point decrease in the property crime clearance rate.

• Higher fees are linked with higher recidivism. When people lack the money to pay their fees, they may commit new crimes to find the money in order to avoid being arrested or incarcerated for not paying fees. A survey of more than 900 people with court debt found nearly 2 in 5 people admitted to engaging in criminal behavior for purposes of paying their court debt, including selling drugs, theft, sex work, writing bad checks, and dealing in stolen goods.  Research has shown increased fees were linked to both increases in both recidivism and the severity of reoffending.

• Fee elimination is a commonsense reform that conservatives across the country have supported. States like Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have recently passed bills to eliminate fees, recognizing the harm that fees do to public safety and the need for more reliable funding for essential government services like law enforcement and courts. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Criminal Justice Task Force recently recognized the public safety harm that comes from reliance on fees in their Resolution in Support of Effective Strategies to Support Law Enforcement and Reduce Violent Crime. The ALEC policy encourages state policymakers to adequately fund law enforcement and to “stop forcing law enforcement to fund significant percentages of their budgets through fines, fees, and forfeitures and [to] instead fund them through a consistent and transparent budgetary process.” So why is Missouri moving in the opposite direction? 

We’re not suggesting that pensions for law enforcement officials shouldn’t be funded. We’re simply opposed to funding them on the backs of the poor. Law enforcement officials should never have to decide that they need to write more tickets so that their colleagues in the sheriff’s office or the prosecutor’s office can have their pension fully funded. Our partners at the Reason Foundation have made the argument that most states include sheriffs in general police/fire pensions and prosecutors in general public employee pensions because these are not employee groups with unique demographics, nor do they have different retirement needs than their agency peers. As an alternative to the current proposal, Reason suggests that Missouri sheriffs should be given the option to remain in their previous retirement system, the Missouri Local Government Employees Retirement System (LAGERS). LAGERS is currently over 100% funded, and absorbing sheriffs back into the system would have a negligible impact on LAGERS’ overall funded status and required contributions. Or, alternatively, each county could absorb the cost of funding the Sheriff’s pension system, which would cost a mere average of just $8,700 in contributions per year.

In summary, Amendment 6 would reinstate a set of perverse incentives that tie pension contributions to the volume of arrests, prosecutions, and other aspects of the criminal justice system. We strongly encourage you to not only vote no but also share this information with other Missouri voters in your network. This is bad public policy, and Missourians deserve better.