Sales Tax Collections Drop - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

Sales Tax Collections Drop

City of Minot Finance Director Cindy Hemphill had a bit of a shock this month -- sales tax collections in the city of Minot were down substantially for January of 2013 when compared to 2012.

After years of seeing steady growth...the drop was pretty remarkable.

The city took in just 900 thousand dollars in sales tax collections for the month.

In 2012 that number was one-point-four million dollars.

It was a drop of about 36 percent.

So what does that mean for the city?

Hemphill says not much quite yet.

The numbers will be watched closely to see if this turns into a trend.

She says it may...or it also may be a case of different businesses reporting at different times that may be make the drop off seem larger than it actually is.

(Cindy Hemphill - City of Minot Finance Director) "The retailers have the option...not really the option but sometimes report later than others so you don't really know that you have the same group that reported in a time frame so we will watch this very closely and see if it is a trend if it will be down this much for each month and then we might have to make some adjustments in the budget for what we planned on using sales tax dollars for."

Hemphill says the next two to three monthly reports will help make that decision.