According to the Sycamore Institute, a Nashville-based public-policy research center, fees and fines have become a shrinking source of funding for state and local budgets.
In Shelby County, the Institute reports, the average revenue derived from fee and fines that is spent annually on county operations from 2017 to 2019 was $24 million — or about 25 per resident each year. Adjusted for inflation, that average was about 30 percent less than a decade prior. Per resident, the decline represented a 19 percent drop.
Collectively, Tennessee’s county governments in recent years collected about $180 million in annual fee and fine revenues — an amount, says the Institute, that may be as little as one quarter of the amount they assessed. These proceeds pay for about 15 percent of local spending on criminal justice.
Moreover, the fees and fines collected by the Department of Revenue are also a relatively small and shrinking part of the state budget ($37.9 million in 2019).
