August sales tax revenue is up 4.2 percent and use tax collections are “holding steady,” Chief Finance Officer/City Clerk Jason Muninger said this week.
“This year’s August sales tax collection was $2,005,594, which is about 4.2 percent higher than August collections last year,” Muninger said. “This puts us about $181,000, or 4.7 percent, over the anticipated budget for the fiscal year so far.”
Muninger said the August collection is only the fourth time that the sales tax revenue has exceeded $2 million, and the first time it has exceeded that amount in the first quarter.
“We typically see those kinds of numbers around the Christmas holiday,” he said.
Muninger said use tax collections for the period were $367,000 — the second lowest collection since the tax went into effect in January.
“Use tax collections have been coming in between $350,000 and $400,000 per month, so those revenues are still exceeding our conservative budget of $2.5 million for the fiscal year,” he said. “We budgeted these collections to be $208,000 monthly, so anything we receive over that is over the anticipated budget.”
Muninger said use tax collections, while “holding steady,” have not necessarily followed sales tax trends.
“Because this is a new tax, we don’t have anything to compare to, so we don’t have any way of gauging if these numbers are high, low, or average,” he said. “We’ll know that better, of course, as we receive collections over the next fiscal year or two. But one observation I’ve made just in the few collections we’ve had so far is it doesn’t seem to track the same as sales tax, in that it doesn’t have the same fluctuations in revenue. We saw larger use tax numbers toward the first of the year, whereas sales tax tends to show the most increase in revenues in the last quarter of the year.”
With only a couple of exceptions, City sales tax collections have shown increases over the past two and a half years, many times with record highs. Local shopping, inflation, and stimulus funds are thought to be factors in the increases.