(The Center Square) — Louisiana municipalities dominate a new national ranking of local governments that rely heavily on fines and forfeitures, with seven of the 10 most dependent cities in the country located in the state.

The Reason Foundation analyzed audited 2023 financial statements from more than 10,000 cities and counties nationwide. Louisiana alone accounted for 57 of the 238 cities where fines and forfeitures equaled more than 10% of general revenue — the most of any state.

Two Louisiana villages topped the national rankings.

McNary reported about $208,000 in fines compared with roughly $71,000 in what Reason classified as general revenue, a ratio of about 292%. Port Vincent collected nearly $494,000 in fines and court fees compared with about $180,000 in general revenue, a ratio of 275%.

Those percentages do not mean either municipality received more than 100% of its total revenue from fines. Reason excludes fines themselves from its “general revenue” calculation, allowing the ratio to exceed 100% when enforcement revenue surpasses the government’s conventional tax-derived and unrestricted revenue base.

Louisiana municipalities also occupied five more of the top nine spots nationally: Kilbourne, Turkey Creek, Dodson, Henderson and Woodworth.

The findings revive longstanding concerns about Louisiana’s mayor’s courts, where mayors can preside over ordinance and traffic cases while also overseeing the finances of the municipality receiving the resulting fines and court costs.

State Rep. Edmond Jordan, D-Baton Rouge, raised those concerns during previous scrutiny of the system.

“If 48 states can live without mayor’s court, why can’t we?” Jordan said in 2023.

Jordan subsequently sponsored a 2024 resolution directing House and Senate judiciary committees to study the feasibility and practicality of mayor’s courts. The measure noted that 91 Louisiana municipalities with mayor’s courts had collected at least 10% of their revenue through fines and forfeitures in 2022. The House approved the resolution 90-0 and the Senate concurred 34-0.

The Louisiana Judicial College advises municipalities to appoint someone other than the mayor to preside when court collections account for at least 10% of overall revenue. Bobby King, a mayor’s court prosecutor who helped conduct Judicial College training, warned that mayors presiding over revenue-heavy courts “can be in a bind.”

“You can be held that you’re violating people’s constitutional rights to due process,” King said during the training.

Henderson, a St. Martin Parish town along Interstate 10 near the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, received particular attention in Reason’s report.

Its 2023 financial statements show the town collected more than $1.5 million in fines and forfeitures, compared with about $893,000 in taxes. Fines represented roughly 42% of total governmental revenue, and Reason calculated collections at about $847 per resident.

Henderson Mayor Sherbin Collette has previously defended the town’s reliance on traffic enforcement, telling The Advocate in 2019 that the municipality had few other revenue sources.

“We don’t have many resources,” Collette said, adding that sales-tax collections were “virtually nil.” He defended enforcement on safety grounds, saying, “I am sure that we save lives every day, every hour.”