Tulsa city councilors begin the process of crafting next fiscal year's budget.
While revenues are expected to be almost $6 million short of this year's projections, the amount they're trying to come up with is closer to $13 million. Mayor's Deputy Chief of Staff Jack Blair said that will help achieve some long-delayed goals.
"Trying to keep up with employee compensation and benefits in those areas that we talked about: the pension plan, heath insurance and kind of trying to get in front of the trend, which has been to put more and more of the burden of those increased costs on employees, and to try to share that burden a little more equitably and to improve employee morale overall," Blair said.
The city will get a boost starting about May since Amazon now collects tax on Oklahomans' purchases, but that revenue stream is limited.
"It's really a small fraction of all the purchases you could make on that platform that are directly from Amazon, so the vast majority of what people buy still won't be taxed," said Finance Director Mike Kier.
Not all that money will go to the general fund, either. Amazon is technically collecting use tax, some of which is allocated to the city capital fund.
"At the moment, I don't think it's a huge issue, and part of this will depend on what, ultimately the size of that is. But I still think, at least initially, it's going to be fairly small compared to everything we collect off sales and use tax," Kier said.
The budget approval deadline is June 23.
