The city of Gig Harbor made more revenue from sales taxes than staff originally predicted so far this year. But there’s a caveat: All of this data comes with a bit of a lag, meaning it’s missing at least one key event of the past months.
The two-month lag means “this is really economic data from February,” city Finance Director Scott Larson explained during a brief presentation to the city council at its May 28 study session.
“There are some headwinds that we’re facing — most recent inflation numbers are fairly high [and] everybody feels it when you go to the gas pump and you have to pump fuel,” Larson said. “There’s a lot of [macroeconomic] uncertainty. All of this data is pre-Iran, so I don’t have the newest data yet.”
More than $9M projected this year
“There’s payers that will have economic activity from February that are still not in these numbers just because of when they filed,” he also noted, referring to when businesses file their taxes. “They are annual filers or quarterly filers. There is a lag, so this is as good of data as we can get at any one time.”…