The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a little known state body called the Council on Local Mandates overstepped its constitutional authority when it tried to strike down a 25 dollar surcharge tacked onto DWI convictions, even though the council had legitimate power to invalidate the underlying police equipment mandate the surcharge was meant to fund. The decision in Reed v. Muoio, handed down July 2nd, closes out a dispute that traces back more than a decade to a 2014 law requiring certain police vehicles to carry dashboard cameras, and it draws a sharper line than the state has ever had around exactly what the Council on Local Mandates is and is not allowed to do.

A Camera Mandate Without Enough Money Behind It

The dispute’s roots go back to a 2014 statute requiring municipal police vehicles acquired after March 2015 and used primarily for traffic stops to carry mobile video recording systems, essentially an early dashboard camera mandate. To help pay for that equipment, lawmakers simultaneously raised the state’s DWI surcharge from 100 to 125 dollars, directing the additional 25 dollars specifically toward the cost of installing the cameras. Deptford Township challenged the camera requirement before the Council on Local Mandates in 2015, arguing it amounted to an unfunded mandate under the state constitution’s requirement that Trenton pay for whatever it requires municipalities to do.

In April 2016, the council agreed with Deptford on the core question, finding a significant gap between what the camera installations actually cost and what the surcharge revenue was bringing in, and declaring the camera mandate unconstitutional as a result. The council did not stop there, however. On its own initiative, without Deptford having raised the issue and without much explanation, the council went on to declare that its ruling on the camera mandate rendered the separate 25 dollar surcharge itself nugatory, essentially void.

Two Drivers Take the Fight to Court

That extra step sat largely dormant until 2021, when Rebecca Reed and Amanda Curry, two drivers who had each been hit with the 25 dollar surcharge following DWI convictions, filed separate class action lawsuits arguing the charge was unconstitutional and that municipalities had no legal basis to keep collecting it given the council’s 2016 finding. Both suits named State Treasurer Elizabeth Muoio and other officials as defendants and sought refunds for everyone who had paid the surcharge since the council’s ruling. A trial court consolidated the cases and then dismissed them after the state argued that the camera mandate being unconstitutional did not automatically mean the surcharge itself was invalid. An appellate court affirmed that dismissal, sending the fight to the state’s highest court.

What the Supreme Court Actually Decided

The Supreme Court’s ruling, written by Justice Michael Noriega, addressed two distinct questions. The first was procedural but consequential in its own right, whether courts can review the Council on Local Mandates’ decisions at all, or whether those rulings sit outside judicial reach as a political question. The Court held that judicial review is available, reasoning that the threshold question of whether the council acted within its own legal authority is precisely the kind of question courts are equipped to answer, not a matter better left to the political branches.

On the substantive question, the Court left the council’s core finding on the camera mandate untouched, since the state never challenged that part of the ruling. But it firmly rejected the idea that the council had authority to go further and strike the surcharge itself. The justices pointed to the actual language of the Local Mandates Act, which restricts the council’s rulings to the specific statutory provision found to be an unfunded mandate and directs it to leave the rest of a law intact wherever possible, along with an explicit provision barring the council from ruling on whether a statute’s funding is adequate in the first place. Based on that language, the Court concluded that once the council determined the camera mandate itself was unconstitutional, its authority over the matter ended there, and that the surcharge, a separate funding mechanism that was never the actual subject of Deptford’s original complaint, fell outside what the council had any power to touch.

The Court was direct about where that leaves things going forward. Any decision about what should ultimately happen to the 25 dollar surcharge, whether it should be repealed, redirected to a different purpose, or left in place despite the mandate it was created to fund no longer existing, belongs to the Legislature rather than to the council or the courts. That leaves lawmakers holding a genuine, if narrow, policy question, what to do with a fee that continues generating revenue for a dashboard camera program the state’s own review process already found constitutionally unenforceable nearly a decade ago.

A Clearer Line for a Body Most Residents Have Never Heard Of

Beyond resolving the specific fight over Reed’s and Curry’s refund claims, which the ruling effectively forecloses since the surcharge remains valid, the decision gives New Jersey a considerably clearer picture of how much power the Council on Local Mandates actually holds. The council exists specifically to police one narrow constitutional guarantee, that the state cannot force municipalities to spend money on programs Trenton itself has not funded, and the Supreme Court’s ruling confirms that its authority stops precisely at that boundary. It can strike down an unfunded mandate. It cannot use that finding as a springboard to unwind other, separate pieces of a statute that were never actually challenged, however logically connected those pieces might seem. For a body most New Jersey residents have likely never heard of, the ruling represents a meaningful clarification of exactly how far its reach extends, and, just as importantly, exactly where that reach stops.