City officials discuss COVID-19 impact on city taxes, revenue

JACKSON, Tenn. — City of Jackson officials continue to look at how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact taxes across the city and the upcoming budget.

“Currently, we are looking at impacts to hotel-motel tax, sales tax, as well as some business taxes,” said budget committee Chairman Paul Taylor. “Also, our intergovernmental taxes which are taxes that we receive, a shared tax from the state. We are seeing impacts on those as well.”

Taylor said the city is now seeing more expenses than revenue coming in.

“Our expenses have outgrown our revenue growth, and so we continue to see a gap in that regard and as we move into future fiscal years and even on a quarterly basis in this year, we’ll be looking at how that revenue expense are tracking, and we will have to take action at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, to help bridge that budget gap,” Taylor said.

Earlier this week, the city council had a seven hour meeting to look at each department’s budget. Taylor said the current budget will allocate $4.2 million from the general fund balance toward the City of Jackson’s operations.

“It’s not anticipated that will be the number at the end of the fiscal year, but that again aligns with what I was just speaking about about revenues and expenses. We will have to continue to keep an eye on those,” Taylor said.

Several projects the city had planned for won’t be completed in the 2020-2021 fiscal year.

“The work has been contracted or there’s been purchase order issued. The work hasn’t been completed yet and so those projects carry over into the future year. As far as our capital budget for this year, it’s pretty bare bones. We have a grant, an anticipated grant from the state to take care of road resurfacing, gas tax money that would go towards the purchase of a pothole repair machine,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the pothole repair equipment is an infrared machine that will allow the city to repair potholes in the winter.