Tax revenue not a concern yet

Revenue from sales tax receipts took a tumble in January, but the figures aren’t a cause of alarm for the City of Green River yet.

Chris Meats, the city’s finance director, said revenue is typically down in January as sales tax from Christmas shopping isn’t available for distribution to towns and cities.

Meats said revenue from sales tax, which accounts for 73% of the city’s total revenue, ranged between $767,000 and $700,000 since the start of the fiscal year, which began in June. January’s tax distribution amounted to $584,000.

When adopting the city’s budget, Meats said the Green River City Council approved a budget based at an average of $750,000 in revenue a month, which the last six months of income have reached. Meats anticipates a larger payment in February will make up the lower amount the city received this month.

While the single month drop in revenue isn’t causing a panic at City Hall, Meats is noticing a new trend in the city’s revenue picture: revenue is nearly flat as opposed to previous months and years.

“We haven’t seen many of the hills and valleys (in graphs mapping the city’s revenue,)” Meats said. “It’s running nearly a flat line.”

Meats’s data goes back to the mid 1990s and a trend of higher sales tax revenue during some months followed by lower revenues in others is apparent throughout that time, especially in the last 10 years.

The revenue the city is receiving matches amounts the city budgeted for in the years between 1996 and 2003, when the city’s budget ranged between $5-7 million a year. It wasn’t until 2005 when the energy boom in Southwest Wyoming resulted in higher amounts of money going to the city, which continued until about 2014, when Meats said the revenue started to slowly decline on a yearly basis.

During that boom, the city’s budget was as high as $12.6 million.

“We nearly doubled (the city’s budget) during the boom,” he said.

For the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the city budgeted a flat $9 million at a time when the city didn’t see the usual summer revenue from tourism and local events.

While the flat revenue amounts are feeding the city’s budget, it does create some problems all the same. Meats said the flat line means the city can’t plan for large-scale expenditures like streets projects. Yet, a problem that would quickly develop is if that revenue begins to decline further, which would put the city in a position where the Council would have to determine what it would need to cut from next year’s budget.

“If it dips in the next five to six months, we might not be in a position to keep services,” he said.

The city will start its budgeting process in February, though Meats said internal decisions about where the city should focus that budget won’t be made immediately.