While the City’s sales tax collections were up 1.27 percent from December of last year, they’re only up .17 percent year-to-date. Finance Director Pat Jones said the flat sales tax over the last two years means the City hasn’t experienced any growth.

Jones said the City would like to see some growth because it would show tax collections are increasing. However, with the Christmas Festival being rained out and cold, Jones said he’s anticipating red in the sales tax on January’s report. Collections on December’s report reflect taxes collected in November and January’s report will reflect the taxes collected in December.

On the bright side, Jones said that while being flat is normally not good, Natchitoches is blessed compared to other cities across the state.

For the TIF collections, the City was 27.71 percent over December of last year. However, the year-to-date collections were down 13.20 percent. However, Jones said the City didn’t budget to spend everything it was budgeted to take in because it’s trying to build up funds to take care of some infrastructure needs in the TIF areas. The decrease from last year’s numbers means there’s less money for the City to put toward those projects.

See the full finance report below