City budget committee to monitor tax revenue, discusses COVID-19 impact

JACKSON, Tenn. — The city budget committee met for updates on the next fiscal year’s budget revenues.

“One of the things that we’re going to be monitoring on a month-to-month basis is our revenues, especially our sales tax and our hotel-motel tax,” budget committee Chairman and Councilman Paul Taylor said.

Taylor and the rest of the city’s budget committee plan to keep eyes on these two things moving forward. He said they’ve moved more significantly than others.

“Because of the projected revenues that we had to use for our budgeting, we’ll be going into a quarterly review situation,” Taylor said.

That means they’ll review in October, January and April. The committee projected conservatively in a few areas of the budget.

“If those revenue streams continue to perform better than we projected, then that draw on the fund balance will be reduced accordingly,” Taylor said.

“If we see things go the other direction, then we’ll have to make some decisions on how we deal with those revenue losses,” he said.

As for the pandemic’s impacts on the budget?

“We’re seeing a reduction in tourism, and that continues to move on into reduction in sales tax, you can project that forward,” Taylor said.

“However, with sales tax, we did not see a decrease on a year-to-year basis for this month, where we had seen a slight decrease in that the prior month,” Taylor said.

The most recent report on hotel-motel tax showed it was down about 37 percent from this time last year.