The state of Utah allows tickets and fines to make up 25 percent of revenue without any penalty
- Six Utah cities earned over 10 percent of general fund revenue from traffic fines in 2024.
- Sunset led the state by collecting nearly $500K or 14.7 percent from traffic enforcement.
- Practice raises growing concerns about quotas, policing priorities, and loss of public trust.
Some small towns in Utah might be pulling more from your glovebox than you think. A new report from the Utah State Auditor’s Office shows that several cities across the state continue to lean heavily on traffic fines to pad their budgets. That’s despite a 2021 law aimed at discouraging exactly this practice.
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The audit highlights six cities where traffic-related fines and fees made up more than 10 percent of general fund revenue in 2024. Leading the pack is the city of Sunset, where traffic-related fines brought in $499,950, or just under 15 percent of its total general fund.
Legal Loopholes Keep the Cash Flowing
Somehow, that’s not technically illegal. The 2021 law, Senate Bill 75, only required cities to forfeit excess revenue if fines and fees exceeded a quarter of their general fund. This means Sunset could’ve gone even harder into fines and fees without any penalty at all. Even if it had generated more than 25 percent of its revenue through traffic fines, it wouldn’t have dealt with a fine of any sort. That cash would’ve just gone to the Utah Department of Transportation.
So, in terms of legality, Sunset was a full 10.1 percent below the legal limit. Despite that, it’s still raising red flags. The auditor’s report didn’t even caution that excessive dependence on fines can shift police priorities away from public safety and toward revenue generation. Ticket quotas are banned in Utah, but this sort of report calls into question whether departments are engaging in them anyway.
Other Cities Show Similar Patterns
Mantua City came in second place, with 13 percent of its revenue coming from tickets. That’s actually very much down from 2014, when over a third of its total revenue came from speeding fines. Note that we didn’t say traffic fines. Just the speeding ones made up over $221,000 of a total revenue of $649,000 according to KUTV.
Other cities that brought in more than a tenth of their revenue via traffic citations were Enoch, Naples, Gunnison, and South Salt Lake. Is this sort of thing reasonable for small cities, or should they focus on other means of revenue generation? Let us know in the comments below!
