We've had this sort of problem in Missouri for some time. An interesting case was Macks Creek. [0] That link claims that the new law "limited" traffic ticket revenue. It didn't, actually, it just said that any revenue over the limit wouldn't stay with the municipality, but would be transferred to the local public school district. That got rid of Macks Creek! I suspect that if that law were expanded from traffic tickets to encompass court fees as well, it would do quite a bit to discourage the municipal courts in Ferguson and neighboring towns from victimizing the public as they have. Sadly, I also suspect that racism will prevent this obvious fix from ever being implemented, even though poor whites throughout the state are victimized in similar ways.

Maybe I'm overstating my case. From a governance perspective, St. Louis is kind of a mess anyway. The city-county split in 1877 [1] set the tone for the constant division and re-division the area has seen ever since. Every time some suburban nitwit gets pissed off about something, instead of trying to fix it directly through existing channels, he starts circulating a petition to set up some new barely-incorporated village or district or whatever. Since these entities are tiny, no one pays attention to them, so corruption is rampant. The long practice of locating limited-access highways so as to destroy less-favored neighborhoods is also pretty terrible.

[0] http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/02/news/mn-9388

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Sep...