Tax revenues ended up being higher than anticipated for the city of Santa Maria over the past pandemic year. The City Council recently passed budget adjustments that will increase funding for public safety and other departments, which the Police Department plans to use for a mental health response vehicle.
The city passed its biennial budget a year ago, so the City Council considered recommendations for mid-cycle amendments to the budget at a June 15 meeting. Despite concerns that city sales tax revenue would plummet during the COVID-19 pandemic, that income actually remained steady in fiscal year 2019-20 ($23.7 million) compared to 2018-19 ($24 million), and those revenues are anticipated to have increased in 2020-21 ($26.1 million), City Manager Jason Stilwell told the council.
“We’re fortunate in a couple areas compared to some of the other cities that were really impacted with loss of revenue,” Stilwell said. “One is our revenue tends to be locally grown. … It’s people who are here, who are shopping here, living here. And then the other side of it is our revenues tend to be basic commodities such as our big-box retailers, vehicle sales—things that remained strong during this past year.”
Some revenue streams did feel the COVID-19 impact, such as the transient occupancy tax (TOT). But Santa Maria doesn’t rely on these taxes as much as other cities do.
“Our TOT revenue is the revenue we get off of tourists and travelers staying in our hotels, primarily,” Stilwell said. “It’s not one of our primary revenues compared to some of our neighboring communities either to the north or south. It did take a large drop as the stay-at-home order was in effect, as people weren’t able to travel.”
Despite those TOT losses, the city is in a much better financial position than it anticipated during budget discussions last year. Stilwell said he expects Santa Maria’s total general fund revenues to be nearly $73 million for the past year.
“Last year at this time when the council adopted the budget, we thought that those revenues would be $70 million,” he said.
The city appropriated $72.4 million for fiscal year 2020-21, and the originally adopted budget appropriated a similar amount for 2021-22. But with the better-than-expected tax revenues, city staff recommended increasing the 2021-22 appropriation to $76.4 million.
Of that $4 million increase in appropriations, about half will go to the Santa Maria Police Department.
“There’s a number of shifts in order to maintain and enhance police and fire, and public safety, and so you’ll see on the Police Department here we’re able to increase that budget in the general fund [by] $2.1 [million],” Stilwell said.
Councilmember Gloria Soto asked for more information about a mental health response vehicle the Police Department plans to use part of the money to purchase.
“We’re in the process of working on an MOU with Behavioral Wellness to have a co-response vehicle, much like they have in the Sheriff’s Department,” Police Chief Marc Schneider said at the meeting. “And ideally we want to do that with an unmarked vehicle, so when the officer and the clinician respond out to help somebody in a crisis, that they can do that in the most nonthreatening way possible.”
With no public comment requests, the proposed amendments to the budget passed unanimously.
This article appears in Jun 24 – Jul 1, 2021.