The Fayetteville City Council met on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, to address a variety of items including financial reports, rezoning requests, a sewer damage claim, public safety grants, and urban agriculture ordinances. The meeting lasted approximately three hours and included multiple votes and public comments.
All right, good evening, everybody. We are going to call to order the Tuesday, June 2nd meeting of the Fayetteville City Council. Clerk Paxton, will you please call the roll? Ms. Bench here. Ms. Turk. Here. Minister Jones. Present. Mr. Stafford. Present. Dr. Jones. Here. Ms. Moore. Here. Mr. Wheateker. Here. Mr. Berna. Here. Mayor Ron. Here. Please join me as we recite the five. Okay. Very first up this evening. We have a sales tax and monthly financial report from Stephen Dotson, RCFO. Stephen, I will turn it over to you. Thanks, Mayor. Starting off with the sales tax report, and this is the uh March sales tax report for taxes received in April of 2026. In March, we saw taxable sales in the city totaling approximately 298.8 million, which uh basically matched the taxable sales in March of 2025. So we didn't really see an increase or a decrease compared to last year in total taxable sales. Retail trade was up one percent year over year, representing an increase of 1.4 million. Accommodation and food services were up 5% or 2.1 million. Wholesale trade was up nine percent or around 1.6. Um I think the most important point to note um for the sales tax report for this month is that we are comparing it to March of 2025. And if you recall from my comments uh last year around this time, that was right before the tariffs took effect. So we saw huge increases in manufacturing and transportation. We were up around 22 million dollars as a result of those uh the tariff purchasing last year. Um so it was a little bit difficult to compare uh this year with last year, uh given that last year was such a huge uh month of of March. But um uh we were uh I guess uh to report out net we were pretty much flat in comparison with last year. Compared to 2025, um our tax collection was also flat. Our city one penny was down two hundredths of a percent or around four hundred dollars. The county portion was down five hundredths of a percent or roughly twelve hundred dollars, resulting in a total combined sales tax collection decrease of uh three hundredths of a percent, so almost nothing, around sixteen hundred dollars. When we look at what was budgeted, um the city one penny was down approximately two point nine three percent compared to budget, that's around eighty-eight thousand. The county portion was down around two point nine six percent or seventy thousand for a combined total for the month of March down two point nine four percent compared to budget.