4 Virginia Towns That Lean Hardest on Traffic Fines

In Waverly, southeast of Petersburg, traffic fines once made up nearly 35% of the town’s income.

That’s a lot of tickets, and it wasn’t the only Virginia town getting drivers into trouble.

Here are the Virginia towns that lean hardest on traffic fines.

Note: This is general information, not legal advice. Town budgets and fine totals are subject to change.

Who Counted the Fines and How

In 2019, Governing, a magazine that covers state and local government, gathered thousands of audits from towns, cities and counties.

It added up the fines and other court money each place collected.

Then it compared that total to the place’s general fund, the money your town uses for everyday costs.

The data came from each place’s latest audit as of summer 2019, which was usually from fiscal 2017 or 2018.

It flagged places where fines were above 10% of general revenues or above $100 per adult resident.

Places that collected under $100,000, or never answered its requests for records, didn’t make the list.

Eight Virginia places made the list, which includes four towns, a city and three counties.

Radio IQ, a public radio network, reported the Virginia results on Sept. 9, 2019.

Virginia Mercury and Radio IQ framed the results around traffic fines and tickets, but Governing‘s totals include all fines and forfeitures.

That includes punitive fees, other court revenue and forfeitures, but not non-punitive fees or charges for services.

The totals aren’t meant to estimate how many citations a town writes.

Some towns report fines they collected but didn’t keep.

These are the Virginia towns on that list with the biggest share of their money coming from fines, starting with the highest.

1. Eastville

In the 2019 data, Eastville’s fines and forfeitures made up 72% of its $349,232 town budget, the highest share on the list.

That works out to about $250,000 from fines.

Norfolk TV station WTKR counted 19,928 citations across 20,104 stops by Eastville police from July 2022 to November 2023.

Only 161 warnings went out.

If you were stopped by an Eastville officer then, a citation was far more common than a warning.

In 2023, the town’s police chief said fine money pays for the police department.

2. Waverly

Waverly, southeast of Petersburg, depended on fines for nearly 35% of its income.

The exact figure was 34.8% of town revenue.

That’s about $35 of every $100 the town took in.

It’s also more than three times the 10% mark used in the tests above.

That figure is old.

It comes from a 2014 financial statement, so it shows you the town’s books from that year, not today’s.

3. La Crosse

Fines made up 20.8% of La Crosse's total revenues in the 2019 data.

That's about one dollar in every five the town took in.

The town sits off Interstate 85 near the North Carolina line.

Only two towns ranked higher.

4. Gordonsville

Gordonsville, between Charlottesville and Louisa, got 8.2% of its total revenues from fines in the 2019 data.

That was the lowest share of these four towns.

The list doesn't say which of the two tests Gordonsville met.

Governing's state-by-state tally found only three Virginia places above 10% of general revenues.

Two Towns Since 2019

Two of these towns have newer numbers.

In October 2026, the Eastern Shore Post reported that Eastville cut its police force from six officers to three.

Its adopted budget estimates $480,000 in police revenues, down from the $1.67 million the town budgeted the year before.

Gordonsville's adopted fiscal 2027 budget lists fines and forfeitures of $170,574 in fiscal 2024 and $133,825 in fiscal 2025.

Against the town's general fund revenues of about $2.6 million and $3.7 million in those years, that's about 6.5% and 3.6%.

That budget line is narrower than Governing's measure, so those shares aren't a like-for-like match with the 2019 figure.

Small-Town Audit Gaps

Fines are hard to track in small towns.

In 2019, Virginia Mercury reported that only places with 3,500 or more residents must file annual financial reports with the state's Auditor of Public Accounts.

Governing asked some smaller towns for their reports directly after Census Bureau surveys showed high fine collections.

That means a smaller town's finances may not be in a state report you can look up.

Windsor collected $160,000 in fines in 2013, nearly 10% of local revenue.

As of April 2021, 2013 was the last year Windsor's officials had submitted an audited financial report to the state.

Its proposed budget that year forecast fines at 7% of local revenues.

Windsor isn't on Governing's list, so it isn't in the ranking above.

Fines Nationwide

The Reason Foundation, a think tank, published a count of local fines in June 2026.

It used audited financial statements for fiscal 2023 and found 275 local governments in 25 states with fines above 10% of general revenues.

Of those, 238 were cities and 37 were counties.

Louisiana alone had 57 of the 238 cities above that mark, followed by Georgia with 35 and Tennessee with 33.

Virginia doesn't appear in the report's chart of the eight states with the most such cities.

What Larger Towns Report

Fines look much smaller on the books of the larger towns that file with the state.

A draft of the Auditor of Public Accounts' fiscal 2025 report, dated Feb. 15, 2026, lists Front Royal's fines and forfeitures at $603,244.

Its total local revenue was $12,878,965, so fines made up about 4.7%.

You can find your town in Exhibit B of the draft if it filed a report.