Score one for Mike White. He didn’t see how sales tax receipts were going to drop in Lampasas during the Wuhan Flu lockdown. I took the position that with people ‘locked’ in their homes and tons of businesses shut down, that it would be impossible for sales tax revenue to NOT go down. Turns out Mike was correct.
Despite sales tax revenue for the entire state of Texas DROPPING 11.7% and sales tax allocations for the City of Austin DOWN 19.9%, the City of Lampasas was UP 8.8% for the month of April.
Excuse me while I eat this crow.
Lampasas sales tax allocation jumped from roughly $158,000 in April 2019 to $172,500 for April 2020.
I would love to get hold of a breakdown of the numbers and see how this happened. I’m genuinely curious. I can only think of a few reasons:
(1) The population of Lampasas grew BIGLY over the last 12 months. Maybe an extra 100 people live here now and they all spent $2000 in April? An extra $200k of sales would result in roughly $15k extra of sales tax, very roughly.
(2) A LOT of out-of-town locusts traveled from liberal dumps like Austin to Lampasas to buy scarce toilet paper and other non-food consumables?
(3) Maybe the lure of 0% on automobiles pulled forward demand on a bunch of cars from the future? The marginal buyer saw that 0% and said “I was gonna wait a year to buy a new truck but I better grab it now”. It would not take too many extra cars at $1500 or $2000 tax each to make up that difference.
(4) Everyone sat at home an ordered an extra several hundred dollars MORE than usual from Amazon? I don’t know how those Amazon sales taxes are collected (or even if they ARE – I know I get charged sales tax when I order) but perhaps panic-buying of useless shit put us over the top?
Of course, these increases would all have to MORE THAN offset large declines for some of the businesses in town that got bent over and shafted. One local business held up as an example by Mike himself claimed revenues were down roughly $50,000 PER WEEK. That business loss alone would have caused a large dent in sales taxes.
So, that’s the good news. The bad news is that Mandy Walsh and the LEDC now have more money to set on fire. A salivating Finley is probably already counting out the salary increases for City employees for next year (ALL of whom were safe from job loss during the Wuhan Flu, btw).
Additionally, since the City was too cheap to pay a decent wage to lifeguards this summer, the Hanna Pool is closed this year – a pool which appears to COST the City over $80,000 per year to operate. That means EVEN MORE money in City coffers for Finley and Mandy to mismanage and waste.
That is a bad thing.
It DOES, however, kinda makes me wonder why we handed out over $170,000 in free money to help local businesses though: the LEDC gave out $100k in grants plus the City handed out $72,000 in ‘free’ electricity. The sales tax numbers sure seem to say we came out unscathed compared to the state of Texas as a whole and especially the large cities.
It’ll be interesting to see what the numbers are going forward. Was April just a lot of demand pulled forward? Will we thus see sizable decreases in May, June, July, etc?
Stay tuned!