Although sales tax figures have dropped slightly in Columbus over the past 30 days, Chief Financial Officer Mike Bernsen said the city is still posting higher numbers than predicted for the year.
“We collected $809,699 in the month of May and $728,609 in the month of June,” Bernsen said. “We are still doing better than we were doing a year ago.”
Bernsen said the decrease in the June numbers, which reflect April spending trends, could be due to several issues.
“There really isn’t a science to this,” he said. “It could be something as simple as people have spent all of their income tax money. It’s not unusual to see a spike in collections for the months of March, April and May. A decrease from a previous month is really not something we worry about. What’s important is to look at collections over 12 months. As long as we collected more money than we did in the previous year — that is what we look at.”
Bernsen said the increase in sales tax could mean good news for the city.
“When we start working on the budget for next year, we will go back and look at the sales tax history and base our budget on those numbers. The numbers as a whole are higher than last year. If this continues, we may have more money in the budget than we had last year.”
The budgetary process will begin “in a couple of weeks” Bernsen said.
The collected sales tax is used as for the city’s general operating funds, except for the sales tax collected at the city’s hotels and restaurants. The restaurant portion of the tax money funds the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and the hotel portion is to pay for the Trotter Convention Center bonds. The restaurant portion is levied on restaurants with annual sales of $325,000 or more. The city receives the hotel portion of the sales tax. The tourism tax went into effect in 1986 and cannot be repealed, until 2018, under provisions set by the Mississippi Department of Revenue.
Nancy Carpenter, CVB Executive Director, said she is also planning her fiscal year 2012 budget.
“I haven’t received a check from the city yet, but I’ve been told by the state’s tax office that we will be getting $121,187 in sales tax money for the month of July,” Carpenter said. “This is up from $118,630 from June of last year. We determine our budget based on predicted receipts. We will begin making our (2013) budget sometime next month.”
Carpenter said her year-to-date-receipts from the city has been $887,739 and actual receipts from October 2011 to May 2012 has been slightly more than $1 million.
“We are slightly under for our predicted receipts from the county,” she said. “We were told we were going to get all of this money because people at Kior and other industries were going to be spending money in Lowndes County. We budgeted $63,000 from the county through this month and we’ve only received about $55,000.”
Carpenter said the city will be receiving $26,734 from the hotel tax according to the state sales tax office.
Area Sales Tax Receipts
April 2012 May 2012 May 2011 Annual change
Lowndes Co. $5,523,792 $5,059,038 $4,906,436 3.11%
Oktibbeha Co. $3,165,043 $3,621,829 $3,129,956 15.7%
Clay County $1,040,575 $968,220 $936,543 3.3%
Noxubee County $409,939 $404,514 $337,710 19.8%
Jeff Clark was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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