Englewood got good news on the financial front.

Frank Gryglewicz, finance director, said he was pleasantly surprised by the report on the January revenue collections he presented to the Englewood City Council at the Feb. 17 meeting.

The January revenues, money collected during the holiday season, is an important part of the annual budget. Gryglewicz said the total revenue collections were down about $45,000 or 1.2 percent from January 2008 revenues. The report also showed that the sales and use tax collections were about $3 million, about $15,000 or 0.5 percent less than collected in January ’08

“This really is good news because, with the current economic climate, I expected this report would show a big drop in sales and use taxes,” Gryglewicz said. “I expected retail sales and the tax from those sales to be down 8 to 10 percent. Fortunately, I was wrong and, while we don’t know what the rest of the year will bring, at least we are off to a good start on 2009.”

He said the revenue collections are about 3 percent less than budgeted

Mayor Jim Woodward agreed. He said the report is positive because it means Englewood businesses did pretty well when it comes to holiday retail sales.

Councilman Wayne Oakley agreed.

He said, as the Englewood representative to the Denver Regional Council of Government and at the meeting of the 53 governmental agencies, he hears that so many other Colorado cities were hit hard by a drop in retail sales over the holidays.

He said he was pleased with the financial report because he had expected Englewood would see a big drop in revenues, primarily because of the drop in retail sales.

Sales and use tax are the most important and probably the most unstable source of city revenues. Last year, sales and use tax generated 59 percent of all the revenues

However, the flow or revenues from sales and use tax isn’t consistent and is hard to predict.

The taxes are generated when retailers add 3.5 percent city sales taxes to the price of the taxable items sold. Each month, vendors keep 0.5 percent of the sale tax collected and turn the remainder into the city.

Gryglewicz said the city has issued sale tax licenses to hundreds of vendors. The majority are within the city limits. But Englewood also issues sales tax licenses to a large number of stores located outside the city because they sell and deliver items to city residents. When an item is purchased outside the city but delivered to an Englewood resident’s home, the vendor is supposed to collect sales tax and send the money to the city. Annually, that amounts to between $2.5 million and $3 million.

Finances