Jamestown City Comptroller Joe Bellitto (standing) shares the final sales tax figures for 2019 with the Jamestown City Council during its Feb. 10, 2020 work session meeting.
JAMESTOWN – The city of Jamestown had another “very good” quarter for sales tax revenues during the final quarter of 2019.
A comparison of the quarter-by-quarter sales tax revenue for the city of Jamestown for both 2018 and 2019.
City Comptroller Joe Bellitto updated the Jamestown City Council this past Monday night, saying the city’s fourth-quarter payment of $1,663,443 was $94,371 more than the amount it received during the same time period one year earlier.
With the final quarter now in the books, the city now knows how much sales tax revenue was actually brought in during 2019. The total sales tax revenues received was $6,715,249. That’s $515,000 (8.3%) more than the $6,200,000 that was initially budgeted in the 2019 city budget. It’s also $280,913 (4.4%) more than what the city collected in 2018.
According to Bellitto, the average annual increase for sales tax in Jamestown during the past decade was at about 2.2%, meaning the 2019 increase more than doubled that 10-year trend.
Bellitto also said the increase in sales tax for the year follows a state wide trend. Last week the state comptroller’s office reported sales tax was up by 4.7% statewide in 2019.
With the 2019 sales tax figures reported, one of the final key pieces of the 2019 city audit is now in place. That audit will likely be completed and reported to the city council in the early summer.
Meanwhile, for the 2020 adopted budget, city officials settled on $6,500,000 as the anticipated projected sales tax revenue for the year. The first quarter report of the new year will be delivered to the city council in early May.
So they now have enough to fund the Library?