Sales tax dollars jump in 2015
For the past few years, Pittsburg has seen an increase in its sales tax dollars, but 2015 has shown the biggest increase in years.
Several things have contributed to the increase, including a general turnaround in the economy, as well as a 2013 vote to allow off premise sales of beer and wine in the entire city.
The city of Pittsburg funnels one third of its sales tax into its Economic Development Corporation for use in attracting new business and offering incentives for improvements to existing businesses.
City Manager Clint Hardeman said more sales tax means good news for Pittsburg businesses, not only in their own bottom lines, but in the prospect of attracting new businesses and a growing business climate in Pittsburg.
So far in 2015, there has been a 17 percent increase in sales tax and for September, the number is a staggering 29.41 percent increase.
“We were surprised. We’re forecasting for the end of year – this will be the most the city has collected since 1987 and that’s the earliest our graph shows,” Mr. Hardeman said. “This will definitely be a substantial increase. I like to talk about it in economic development terms. Everybody expects fire protection, everybody expects streets – nobody cares where we get the money.
We get asked, we get told, we get commanded on how to bring new economic development in. We may not be able to get everything everybody wants, but City Hall works very hard to create new job creation and being able to have a budget that allows us to provide incentives can help us have a little bit of leverage over other towns.”
The city is projected to collect almost a million dollars in sales tax for 2015, one-third of which is earmarked for EDC. Pittsburg typically sees $200,000 in sales tax dollars being able to be spent on economic development, but this year that number will jump to nearly $300,000.
“We hope that by us being proactive and having leverage we will be able to entice businesses to come take a look at us,” Mr. Hardeman said. “Increase is good and we hope we continue to see that. We’re able to do more stuff. We don’t want to sit on the money. We want to invest it back into the community. We want to be sure the businesses we are investing in are going to continue to be successful.”
Mr. Hardeman said the city was skeptical that sales tax would increase by such a large margin by passing beer and wine sales in Pittsburg, simply because there was already one precinct that was able to sell those items.
“When we went through that process, we were hesitant that we would see that big of an increase,” he said, “but it’s in the numbers. People like the convenience of one-stop shopping. Your sister communities that are dry are traveling in and are probably spending more money because of where they’re able to shop.”
The Pittsburg EDC has several programs in the works to try to increase new job creation, as well as offer incentives to existing businesses.
By Tori Lyle, news@campcountynow.com -
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