Longboat's mid-year revenue and spending track with budget

It won’t be long before the town dives into budget season for fiscal year 2020, but town leaders took an opportunity this week to look back at the first six months of the current budget and learned everything is on track.

Finance Director Susan Smith led Town Commissioners through a mid-year progress report in which they learned, among other things, the town’s general fund holds about $8.4 million, equal to about 202 operating days for the town.  

Expenses and revenues are largely tracking with last year and current year expectation, though Smith said Manatee County collections of town property taxes were around 95%, down a bit from the year-over-year figure of 96.7% (Sarasota County’s collection rate was above 97%).

Smith said she was in contact with Manatee County tax officials to track down the source of the delinquencies, since most property taxes are paid between November and February.

Here are some other sources of revenue and how they stack up against the current budget and 2018’s mid-year point. Smith cautioned that many of these sources are paid in arrears, so the data might not have caught up the end of March’s mid-year benchmark:

• Gas taxes: $146,388 of the budgeted $380,000 (38.5% vs. 2018’s mid-year milestone of 44.8%).
• Tennis sales: $470,597 of the budgeted $621,533 (75.7% vs. 2018’s mid-year milestone of 75.2%). Smith said more lessons appear to be the reason for the slight increase.
• Half-cent sales tax collections: $256,063 of the budgeted $614,000 (41.7% vs. 2018’s mid-year milestone of 42.7%)
• Ambulance fees: $125,627 of the budgeted $260,000 (48.3% vs. 2018’s mid-year milestone of 49.5%)
• Municipal revenue sharing (sales taxes from the state): $52,962 (34.7% vs. mid-year milestone of 50.7%)
• Building permit fees and related fees: $622,229 of the budgeted $1,144,125 (54.4% vs. 2018’s mid-year milestone of 48.2%.

In total, the fiscal year 2019 general fund has collected 79.8% of its projected revenue ($13,160,215 of the $16,499,559 total). Last year at this time, the town had collected 76.9% of the projected revenue. In terms of total expenses, the town has spent $7,306,059 of its 2019 budgeted total of $16,570,184, which comes to 44.1%. At this time last year, the town has spent 46.4% of its budget.