City Sales Tax Nears $2.5 Million This Year
Another month’s solid gain in sales tax revenue is keeping the city on pace for a record year in 2024.
State Comptroller Glenn Hegar sent the city $221,719 for November, up 10.2% from the same month a year earlier. The November rebate from the state pushes the total so far this year to just under $2.5 million. It’s up 1.6% from this time last year.
La Grange and three other Fayette County towns are up for the year, while the other three have sustained losses.
Fayetteville shows the largest decline – 36.8% - but it’s because 2023 had unusually high revenue. The 2024 payments have dropped back to a more normal pattern but still are well ahead of 2022 or any other previous year.
Schulenburg, the county’s second largest town, is down 7.1% for 2024, while Flatonia is down just under 1%.
Carmine has the greatest gain in the county, up 9.9% from this time a year ago. It’s total so far is $144,066.
Ellinger is up 7.6% and Round Top is up 2.5%.
Around the region, 13 of the towns tracked by the Record have gains this year, while five are down.
Shiner’s sales tax revenue is up 102.4% for the year, but that’s because the town doubled its tax rate from 1% to 2% this year. Lavaca County’s other three towns already were at 2%.
State law allows local sales taxes to be a combined maximum of 2%. If a county, for instance, has a half-percent sales tax, that leaves only 1.5% available to cities or other taxing districts.
Fayette County does impose the half-cent tax while La Grange, Schulenburg, Flatonia, Round Top, Fayetteville and Carmine have a 1.5-cent rate, making the maximum 2.0%.
Ellinger, Fayette’s newest town, adopted a 1.0% tax rate when it first levied the tax in November 2021. So it would be possible for Ellinger to increase its rate to 1.5% at some future time.
The revenue report for November shows that Fayette County’s sales tax rebate is down slightly so far this year.
Despite a gain in November, the year’s total so far is $2.95 million, down less than 1% from last year’s $2.98 million for the first 11 months.
Two other counties in the region are running behind last year’s pace. Washington County is down 3% and Burleson down 9%.
Lee and Gonzales County have increased the most.
Bastrop County, where new subdivisions continue to sprout constantly, has taken in just over $8 million in sales tax so far in 2024, up 5.8% from a year earlier.
Bastrop County’s current population estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau is 115,161. In 2020 it was less than 100,000.
It made national headlines when Elon Musk announced in September than he was officially moving the headquarters of X, formerly known as Twitter, to Bastrop. In 2021, he moved the Tesla headquarters to Austin.
Tesla calls its Austin plant the Gigafactory and its “global headquarters.” It’s located southeast of Austin toward Bastrop County.
Besides the X headquarters, Bastrop County already production plants for Musk’s SpaceX and the Boring Company. These plants are on FM 1209, about 42 miles from La Grange.