Despite reports of high Christmas sales from local businesses, the county sales tax for the final two months of 2002 only marked a .44 percent increase in sales, according to the Athens County Budget Commission.
Sales tax revenues from January were down 6.47 percent from 2001, while February sales tax revenues were up 8.48 percent. Because sales taxes are reported on a two-month delay, January statistics deal with November sales and February statistics deal with December sales.
Athens County Auditor Jill Thompson said the very slight increase was not what she hoped.
"We'd like our numbers to be higher, but they aren't," she said.
Karen McGuire, manager of The Import House, 68 N. Court St., said that her numbers seemed to match up with the county totals.
"Our sales were down in the fall and then we had a booming Christmas, which made up for it," she said.
Kris Cornwell, owner of Cornwell Jewelers, 77 N. Court St., attributes a lot of the discrepancy to the late Thanksgiving, cutting out a week of possible high sales in November.
"People waited until the Thanksgiving holiday was over before they started thinking about Christmas shopping," she said.
Athens Chamber of Commerce President Larry Payne said the numbers did not surprise him.
"For the year being down, part of that has to do with the East State Street project," he said. "We had a healthy December because construction wasn't a problem then."
Payne said that the widening of East State Street and the subsequent construction has hurt the businesses in that area of Athens. Even the addition of Wal-Mart in the fall, which was expected to be a major revenue source, could not absorb all the losses.
"It would be almost impossible for one store to make that up," he said.
If construction had not been a factor, Payne said he expected Wal-Mart would have had more of a push on the numbers, which will most likely stay low until at least August of this year.
"[An increase] will probably show up a year from now when businesses can reach their full capacity of potential customers," he said. "Because businesses are suffering now, there's that problem that businesses will be out before that finishes. It's a very difficult situation."
Thompson said there is no way to affect the current situation and how much sales tax comes in to the county, as it is simply based on consumer purchasing.
"I don't think it's something we can influence," she said "There isn't anyway we can force people to purchase."
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Lindsey Nelson
