What were they thinking at City Hall last year?

Maybe a better question to ask is "What were they drinking?".

This is yet another in my regular monthly installments on how poorly sales tax receipts fared this month against expectations. The raw figure is $53,901.03 meaning the city received that much less than the budget forecast it would receive. On the ledger, that means the city is facing a $214,411.59 budget gap for this fiscal year which city officials constantly try to reassure me is no big deal because it has the reserves and the empty budgeted staff positions that more than compensates for this shortfall.

But those same raw figures still leave me scratching my head. The $568,870.97 the city received for the month of June is a nice 12 percent more than the receipts from the same month last year. Most cities would be ecstatic to experience a 12 percent increase in sales taxes per month. I've heard Buda projects a measly 8 percent month-over-month sales tax increase. For them, a 12 percent hike is manna from heaven, but for us it is not good news.

Here's the kicker, however: the city’s forecast was that Kyle would actually collect $622,722 in sales taxes this month. That’s a whopping 23 percent increase over last year’s number. 23 percent!!!! Are you freaking kidding me?

For the year, the city has collected 10.03 percent more than it did last year, but the forecast was for a 14.58 percent increase in sales tax receipts after nine months of the fiscal year.

Travis Mitchell seems to be the only person on the City Council who’s overly concerned about all of this and during last year’s budget negotiations he tried, unsuccessfully it turned out, to cut Finance Director Perwez Moheet’s sales tax estimates. Look, I respect Moheet. I consider him one of the better municipal finance directors I’ve come across in my 50+-year professional life. But it doesn’t take that much of a financial wizard to realize that with the type of growth Kyle is experiencing, the city’s sales tax numbers will continue increase, but the percentage of that increase will most likely decline year-after year.

I would like to see Mitchell or someone else have the courage this year to hold the city’s feet to the fire and insist on a budget that forecasts, at the most, a 10 percent increase in sales tax receipts — maybe even 9.5 percent — during the upcoming fiscal year. That amount of an increase is still worth celebrating and it will send a signal to those looking to invest in our community that (1) we appear to be fiscally realistic about our financial revenue expectations and (2) there’s nothing funny seeping into the city’s water supply.