View Full Version : City sales tax collection



Pete
05-31-2017, 11:19 AM
Press release from the city and it's finally good news on this front:


05/31/2017


Oklahoma City’s May sales tax summary

The May sales tax report shows General Fund collections in Oklahoma City were up 2.6 percent compared to the same month last year, above the monthly projection by 3.2 percent.

The May report includes collections for the last half of March and estimated collections in the first half of April, which total about $18.4 million for the General Fund. That’s around $576,000 above the projection.

May is the 11th month of the fiscal year, and General Fund sales tax revenue is about 0.8 percent (about $1.6 million) below the amended year-to-date projection.

The May report snaps a streak of 12 straight months of declining sales tax revenue compared to the same month the previous year. General Fund sales tax revenue has declined compared to the same month the previous year in 18 of the last 20 months.

The General Fund pays for the City’s day-to-day operations. Sales tax is the City’s largest single source of revenue.

The City collected around $35.6 million in total sales tax revenue during the May reporting period, including collections for the General Fund, MAPS 3, Police, Fire and the Zoo.

king183
05-31-2017, 01:29 PM
Great news. I'm curious how much of that is due to Amazon remitting tax.

I also noticed the OKC unemployment rate fell to 3.5%

Urbanized
06-01-2017, 07:55 AM
Most people don't think about this, but I'm quite certain weather made a significant impact on collections over the past several months. Prior to May we had about 10 of 12 weekends that were cold and/or rainy. Weekdays were nice, but weekends were abysmal. What this does is keep people inside in general. No outdoor activities, less eating out, fewer trips to the mall. More sitting at home watching TV, surfing the web, buying online, etc.

I'm particularly dialed into this because if the business I'm in, but after comparing notes with others in the tourism, service and retail industries I know that poor weather weekends absolutely KILLED all of our spring seasons, relatively speaking. This happened city-wide, of course.