This work session of the Tuscaloosa City Council focused on two major topics: a detailed revenue projection review for fiscal year 2027 led by the finance department, and a comprehensive presentation on the Saban Center's capital and operational funding plans. The meeting highlighted conservative budgeting due to anemic sales tax growth, concerns over the Simplified Sellers Use Tax (SSUT) erosion, and the complex financial structure of the Saban Center involving multiple funding sources and departmental support.
Revenue Projections for FY2027
Saban Center – Capital and Operational Funding
It's funny how three years. Tear it up before we get started on this man and on film review. Right. You know I am. Back up medicine. Thank you. Okay. What you have in front of you. Actually, I know that I need to speak into this microphone, correct? Okay. I was chastised last time about not speaking in the microphone. So what you have in front of you is one of the majority of analysis that we will do every fiscal year to be able to project new revenues into the future. We will do monthly revenue reviews in this same type of vein. And we will produce a revenue report and a revenue email that we send to the mayor. I know that the mayor then forwards it on with any additional information to the council at times. So you might have seen something like this already. But just to be able to walk through it so that you know where we come from when we are trying to project revenues in the general fund and in elevate. So the front page is really kind of your summary. These are all of our major revenues. It totals up to 176 million dollars. If you look in your budget book, the total overall revenues for the general fund is 234 million dollars. So we're looking at 75% of all general fund revenues with just this picture on the front page. And that's purely for from a time standpoint. I'm sorry. That's purely from a timing standpoint. Oh, as in well, now we will do we will project all the other revenues too, but we do the deep dive, the monthly analysis only on these because it's a lot of the other revenues are intergovernmental, so they're grant-based, um, or they are one-time payments, like the for example the bank excise fee, which is over a million dollars, so would meet our threshold for a major revenue source, but we get that one time a year from the from the state. There's no need to like think about economic impacts um hitting that type of revenue stream month to month. That's just kind of silly. Um, so really we do these revenues on a monthly basis, and then I'm about to show you how we project into the future for um for budget determination. So I did not print every single one of them because it's a lot of paper. But if you want to flip to the next page, the next page is uh the sales is the projection for the sales tax budget alone. This is not the elevate portion, although you will see an elevate portion, like a little subset at the bottom. This is not the elevate portion, this is just the general portion. But you will see that we will look at uh monthly collections and what our revenue division does is every single sales tax payment that we receive, we will accrue it back to its exact month. So if we receive a sales tax payment late, which happens quite frequently, and it is for the month of December, our revenue division will go in and take that one check and split it out between the months that it actually applies to. So the month-to-month detail that you see on this page on the left-hand side is actual activity happening in the economy reported to us via a sales tax return from sales tax collecting businesses in the community. You'll see the increase decrease, which is on the uh very right-hand side of that table, and that just kind of tells us like what our economy is really looking like on the ground. Um obviously you can apply situations that are happening in the community um to these types of numbers. We know what happens in September, October, November around here, the football games and when they occur can have a big play. Um, who we play can have a big um impact on those. So if we have a game, uh if we have three games in September versus two games in September, that can skew your months um year to year. So you have to take those kind of things into account, but this at least gives us a snapshot to start to work from now. Of course, in a whole year, you would think that you would have a full football season. October, November in the beginning, September at the end, and then you can combine those into one full football season. But again, sometimes there's two games in September, sometimes there's three. Sometimes we play um Texas and LSU and Tennessee. Sometimes we just play Auburn. There's there's a lot of just different things that we factor into that. I just that I I mean that is no shaved on up a notch. What do we think we're gonna have for revenue when we close out the fiscal?