Consumer confidence doesn’t appear to have been phased by the coronavirus pandemic locally.
August sales tax receipts for the City of Manhattan showed a modest early summer from consumers. On Tuesday’s edition of In Focus, City Manager Ron Fehr announced a pleasant surprise in numbers, which were about $40,000 above budget.
“Sales tax receipts were $964,429.00. This actually reflects June sales as there’s a two month lag between collecting and receiving numbers for sales tax,” he said.
Early projections by city officials had the city estimating 15 to 20 percent downturns in sales tax revenue. Mayor Usha Reddi says seeing positive revenues for June was good to see.
“People are spending money. People are doing things as normal as they can because they still need to have food and other resources for their homes. So that was a pleasant surprise,” she said.
The numbers reflected even higher June revenues than what was seen in 2018, the final year Country Stampede was held in the Manhattan area. Numbers dipped in 2019 when the festival moved to Topeka.
The city is still down 2 percent for the year in terms of overall sales tax revenue. Early projections were that the city would actually be down much further, around 15 to 20 percent in the red. Fehr says the compensating use tax numbers (online sales tax receipts) were also up in June to their highest level since collections began last summer.
“It’s $348,254.00 so obviously people are ordering more online and I’d encourage them to order from local businesses as well, because that didn’t all go to local businesses like our normal sales tax would,” he said.
June saw 167 new coronavirus cases, which at the time, was the largest monthly increase in new cases since the pandemic began. That has since been trumped by the following two months. A total of 207 cases were totaled in July. August saw 473 new cases added, according to statistics from the Riley County Health Department.
