The Houston Business Journal reports the latest state sales tax disbursements:
The state of Texas collected $1.51 billion in sales tax revenue in September, 13.7 percent more than the same period a year ago.
Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn also disbursed $415.5 million in sales-tax payments to cities, counties, transit authorities and special-purpose taxing districts for the month of October.
Of this amount, Houston received $36.3 million, up 19.4 percent from October 2005.
Harris County does not collect a sales tax. However, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County collects a 1 percent tax. Metro received $35.9 million from the state in October.
Wow! Add in red light camera revenue, and Houston’s sitting pretty! As for Metro, that revenue sure helps with the substantial losses the agency incurs every month as it subsidizes the Danger Train.
Along the line of municipality revenue, a blogHOUSTON reader alerted us to a Federal Reserve study that concludes cities use traffic ticket revenue to bolster lagging city revenues. From the report’s abstract:
Specifically, positive changes in revenue have no effect on traffic tickets, but negative revenue changes increase the number of traffic tickets issued. A one percentage point decrease in revenue yields a 0.38 percentage point increase in traffic tickets. We calculate that traffic ticket revenue supplements a low percentage of local revenue losses.
And if that’s true of hand-written traffic tickets, imagine what a study would conclude when the subject is camera tickets.
RELATED: Study: Traffic Tickets Rise as City Income Falls (theNewspaper.com)
