Recent sales tax distribution records released by the Texas State Comptrollers Office suggest that two Bowie County cities hit a financial slump in the last couple of months.
Earlier this month, the office released its monthly sales tax revenue records showing revenue distribution amounts to local cities and towns. Of the cities and towns in Bowie County, records indicate that both DeKalb and Redwater experienced a substantial drop in sales-tax revenue collected in November compared with the amount collected in November 2017.
DeKalb's sales tax revenue collection amounted to about 44 percent less. DeKalb collected $17,161.59 in sales tax revenue in November 2018 compared with $30,661.27 in November of 2017.
DeKalb City Administrator Abbi Capps said the monthly records don't paint an accurate economic picture of the city's overall annual sale tax collection-one which actually shows positive improvement for the city in recent times.
"I think 2019 will be a great year for sales tax collection,"Capps said. "Just this last year we have had a new hardware store open up as well as a new coffee shop and we've had a trailer business expand its property."
While DeKalb's overall sale-tax collection for 2018 is still being calculated, Capps added that the city's overall sales-tax collections grew by 12 percent from 2017.
Capps added that the city's generated sales tax revenue can oftentimes fluctuate from month to month.
"We have had several months where we collect a lot of sales-tax generated revenue and other months where we didn't generate as much," she said. "November may have been one of those off-months. Overall I believe we did pretty good in sales tax revenue collection for all of 2018 but we won't really know until we finish calculating sales tax figures for all of last year.
"We deliver all of our sales tax information collected for one month over to the comptrollers office on the 20th day of the following month." (Last November's sales tax revenue intake figures were reported to the comptrollers office Dec. 20 and subsequently reported by the comptrollers office earlier this month. December's tax figures haven't been reported yet but they are projected to be turned in by Jan. 20).
As for Redwater, the comptroller's office figures for the same period show that city's November sales tax revenue collections to have dropped by about 20 percent compared with the same month in 2017.
Comptroller records show that Redwater collected $5,013.o7 in sales-tax revenue in November 2018 ccompared with $6,268.53 in November 2017.
Redwater Municipal Clerk Dessie Whelchel said the loss of Redwater Diner to a fire on Jan.19, 2018, could have had an adverse affect on the city's sales=tax revenue collection because the business proved to be a popular eatery.
As to whether or not the decision, by voters, to have both cities go wet in 2015 in order to obtain tax revenue has really helped, Whelchel said that would actually be hard for any city to calculate because the comptroller's office doesn't specifically designate which industries sales-tax revenues are generated by.