City sales tax sees huge spike in revenue

The city of Wimberley has had sluggish growth, if not an actual downturn, in allocations from sales tax for the last year. That trend ended emphatically with December’s allocation from the Texas Comptroller’s Office, which represents the city’s portion of sales tax collected within the city limits in the month of October.

The most recent check for $92,074.18 in the month of December is 40.56 percent higher than the amount collected in the same month of 2017. But it appears that the increase may have come from other areas of the allocation process, as opposed to simply an increase in sales.

“I didn’t see anything significant in October that would have caused that type of jump, but we did have a good weather that month to allow for people to continue traveling late into the fall season,” Craig Calley, president of the Wimberley Merchants Association, said. “It’s also nice that we have not seen a huge negative impact from the construction of the sewer.”

Kevin Lyons, a spokesperson with the Texas Comptroller’s Office, said that the sales made within the city limits were almost identical to 2017. There were two other categories that ended up increasing the monthly check.

“Basically the difference between this December and last was that there were audit collections of about $14,000 and some future collections of about $12,000,” Lyons said.

Lyon gave some hypothetical examples of how the extra money could have been accrued.

“Let’s say I was a business in Woodcreek that moved to Wimberley but I didn’t change my address with the comptrollers office,” Lyons said. “Then we determine later that money should have been for Wimberley, just as an example, we would add it into a month. It could also be we found somebody that had underpaid their taxes.”

While the example given used Woodcreek, it could have been any business that moved into Wimberley from any city that caused such an issue. The city of Woodcreek did not see any money pulled from their December allocations, so the situation did not impact them.

In fact, the city of Woodcreek received just over $4,000 from sales tax allocations in the month of December, which is up 11 percent from the same month last year. On the calendar year, Woodcreek saw a 10.41 percent increase in sales tax allocations.

For the calendar year, the late influx pushed Wimberley’s sales tax allocations into the positive up 2.42 percent. Wimberley is one of two cities in Hays County to only see single digit growth in sales tax during 2018 along with the city of Uhland. Every other city saw at least 10 percent growth in sales tax allocations over the year.

Here’s how the rest of the county’s municipalities fared:

• Buda: Monthly allocation $535,800.29, up 6.92 percent. Year to date total is $6,856,962.65, up 13.77 percent.

• Dripping Springs: Monthly allocation $249,117.13, up 50.77 percent. Year -to-date total is $2,387.553.70, up 17.62 percent.

• Kyle: Monthly allocation $737,462.12, up 22.32 percent. Year to date total is $8,090,180.57, up 10.60 percent.

• Mountain City: Monthly allocation $1,483.74, down .62 percent. Year-todate total is $18,566.6, up 19.88 percent.

• Niederwald: Monthly allocation $3,019.40, up 5.56 percent. Year-to-date total is $39,608.06, up 10.24 percent.

• San Marcos: Monthly allocation $2,586,402.71, up 10.38 percent. Year-to-date total is $27,860,431.05, up 26.19 percent.

• Uhland: Monthly allocation $16,317.87, down 6.87 percent. Year-to-date total is $211,231.41, up 8.34 percent.

Buda, Kyle, Uhland and San Marcos have a sales tax rate of 1.5 percent. The sales tax rate in Dripping Springs is 1.25 percent and it is 1 percent in Hays City, Mountain City, Niederwald, Wimberley and Woodcreek.

San Marcos Daily Record Editor Anita Miller complied data for this report.