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Staring down the barrel of a 7.79% tax increase, Jamestown isn't likely to get much help from unexpected sales tax revenue.
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli recently released local sales tax collections for the third quarter of 2024, a period that covers from July through September. Chautauqua County's collections for the quarter increased 2.5% in 2024 ($25.68 million) from the third quarter in 2023 ($25.06 million). That will bring in a little additional revenue to the city of Jamestown, but not enough to materially close the city's sales tax revenue gap between the 2024 budget and money actually received.
For the year, the county has received $69 million in sales tax revenue, a .2% decrease from 2023 ($69.21 million).
Jamestown officials sounded the alarm on the city's sales tax receipts in August, when Ericka Thomas, city comptroller, told City Council members the city could be looking at a $545,000 budget hole if sales tax receipts don't pick up in the third and fourth quarters of 2024. Thomas said the city's sales tax receipts for the first two quarters of the year had come in a total of $260,558 less than the budget had projected.
Thomas said the third quarter payment was important to watch.
"The next quarter is the biggest one," Thomas said in August. "That's 27% of the budget."
The budget proposed by former Mayor Eddie Sundquist proposed a 4% increase in city sales tax revenues, an amount Mayor Kim Ecklund expressed doubt the city would reach. It was a potential problem the city pushed off into 2025 because the budget had already been passed and tax bills printed for 2024.
Ecklund has proposed less aggressive growth for sales tax in her 2025 budget proposal. The 2024 budget included sales tax receipts of $8,957,572, while the 2025 budget proposal is projecting sales tax receipts of $8,634,168.
That projection is in line with what DiNapoli is seeing across the state. Local government sales tax collections totaled $5.98 billion in the third quarter, an increase of 1.4%, or $82.7 million, compared to the same quarter last year. Local sales tax collections this past quarter continued a general trend of declining growth that followed a post-pandemic spike, with the third quarter's 1.4% year-over-year growth the lowest quarterly increase since the pandemic-induced declines. Local sales taxes grew at an average quarterly year-over-year rate of 3.8% during the period of recovery and expansion following the Great Recession. The third quarter's modest increase in local sales tax collections marked the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth below this pre-pandemic rate.
On a regional basis, the Mid-Hudson and Long Island regions had the highest quarterly growth rates at 3.8% and 1.7%, respectively. Western New York and Central New York followed with growth of 1.5% each.
"Local sales tax collections are growing more slowly than they were in the pre-pandemic period," DiNapoli said. "Given this lower year-over-year growth, local officials should temper their expectations for future sales tax revenues."