City of Amarillo’s sales tax revenue seeing potential decrease of $4 million

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - Now that the City has received the March sales tax revenue numbers, City Finance Director Laura Storrs says Amarillo is projecting a decrease of millions.

“It’s actually our largest revenue source to our general fund operations." Storrs said. "At this point though, now that we’ve received in the collection numbers from March sales, we’ve actually adjusted those projections a little bit, and so now, we are looking at a potential of a decrease of about $4 million.”

Storrs says local grocery and liquor stores actually saw an increase in sales tax revenue, but retail and entertainment saw sharp decreases during the Shelter-in-Place Order.

“We did see continued increases at grocery stores, also at our liquor stores, and as you can imagine, we saw pretty sharp decreases in places like the entertainment venues, that could be movie theaters or other kind of entertainment establishments. We saw a sharp decrease in retail sales as well," Storrs said.

City officials have had to make adjustments to the annual budget in order to make up for the loss in sales tax revenue, which included a hiring freeze within the public safety department.

“Beginning in the middle of March, the City implemented a hiring freeze on the majority of the positions in the general fund," Storrs said. "We do have several police positions and several fire positions vacant at this point, and we are holding those until we see how sales tax numbers are coming in over the next couple of months.”

Storrs says she is encouraged with the reopening of the City’s economy, and she’s hoping to start seeing more increases in sales tax revenue by the end of the summer leading into fall.

“Normally we see, year over year, we see growth in those sales tax numbers, so we’re trying to keep that fairly conservative," Storrs said. "We are hopeful though, that we might actually get back to a more normal time frame towards the end of the summer, possibly the fall.”