But another issue promises to be as volcanic as the other two, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, pitting cities against counties and, possibly, the state courts.

The Utah League of Cities and Towns has shown it intends to fight any effort to change the current practice of city judges raising tens of millions of dollars for their cities through fines and forfeitures in justice courts. I mentioned in a recent column that conviction rates in municipal justice courts are close to 100 percent, leaving the impression that justice suffers when the judges' bosses - mayors and city councils - have a direct financial incentive to issue as many traffic tickets as possible and collect fines from those tickets.

I also mentioned the Utah Judicial Council has commissioned a study on the effectiveness and fairness of municipal justice courts and legislation will be proposed to make some changes, including loosening the relationship between the justice courts and the cities they serve. That led to a League resolution that agrees to some changes, but strongly objects to anything that would curb the city's authority over the court or alter the revenue stream from the courts. Justice court fines and forfeitures amount to tens of millions of dollars that go directly to city coffers and, in some cases, are among the city's main sources of income.

But besides the obvious question of whether justice is served under a system with such built-in conflicts of interest, other governments may be suffering from the greed of the cities for court-generated cash. A study commissioned by the Salt Lake County Criminal Justice Advisory Council found that municipal judges seem unwilling to impose alternative punishments such as community service for misdemeanors. The study found a strong reliance on a "pay or serve" policy; the defendant either pays the assessed fine or goes to jail.

That means misdemeanants from the justice courts have been flooding into the Salt Lake County Jail, according to the study, putting budgetary pressures on the county, which has no control over municipal judges.

"Revenue variation varies among courts, but universally the cities view the courts as a prime revenue source worthy of protection and expansion," the report said. "Justice court judges have no financial incentives, positive or negative, to keep jail population down. They are not held individually accountable for committing inmates nor are they given a finite number of jail beds for each judge or each court."

The Judicial Council's study is driving reform legislation expected at the Legislature in January. It was undertaken after the Utah Supreme Court, in West Jordan City vs. Goodman, suggested there may be separation-of-powers problems with the justice court system that the Legislature may want to look at.

But after stating in the decision that "if the convicting court is constitutionally infirm, then the conviction is necessarily invalid," the court upheld West Jordan's misdemeanor conviction of Christopher Goodman, even while opining that the Legislature seriously consider some arguments raised by Goodman's lawyer.

Had the court ruled in Goodman's favor on constitutional grounds, that may have opened the door to thousands of motions for dismissals of past convictions in justice courts and millions of dollars in refunds.